Fearsome Fargate and Creepy CDK

Hi everyone
A spook-tacular lineup for this month

Ben Townsend - Senior Cloud Engineer at hedgehog lab
Fargate & Furious: Rapid deployments for modern container workloads
Your pipeline is fast. Your containers are ready. But still, you're waiting. The time it takes to pull image containers can be a silent performance killer, slowing down every deployment, rollback, and scale event. In this session, we reveal a different approach that dramatically cuts container start-up times, turning frustrating waits into instantaneous launches. Leave the slow lane behind.

Lee Gilmore - AWS Practice Lead & Principal Architect at Leighton
The CDK Mindset: Building Serverless Solutions As Repeatable Blueprints
This session explores best practices for building production-grade, repeatable AWS CDK solutions as a blueprint using TypeScript, with a focus on delivering scalable, observable, and maintainable infrastructure from the outset. Attendees will learn how to:

• Modularise stacks and code for better maintainability and scalability
• Establish ephemeral environments and CI/CD pipelines from day one
• Bake in observability with tools like Lambda Powertools
• Accelerate development using Aspects and Level 3 constructs
• Inject environment-specific configuration for flexible deployments
• Quickly add dashboards and alarms in a repeatable manner
• Enforce governance using CDK Nag

This talk presents a repeatable blueprint for success, helping teams adopt a mindset that prioritises production readiness, speed, and reliability, all powered by TypeScript and AWS CDK.

Many thanks to hedgehog lab for sponsoring us this month and providing the venue, drinks, and food!

Date: Tuesday October 21
Time: 18:00-20:00
Venue: hedgehog lab, One Strawberry Ln, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 4BX

Hope to see you all there!