Cloud Native London, September 2025

Hi folks!

Welcome to our September Cloud Native London meetup! Join us to hear from our three great speakers and network with your fellow techies over pizza and drinks, or alternatively chat and following along on Youtube!

6:00 Pizza and drinks
6:30 Welcome
6:45 Revolutionize Your Software Delivery with AI-Powered DevOps (Martin Reynolds, Harness)
7:15 Manage Kubernetes at Scale: Platforms, Infrastructures, and k0rdent (Martin Stadler, Mirantis)
7:45 Break
8:00 How Google built a Consistent, Global Authorization System with Zanzibar (and you can too!) (Sohan Maheshwar, AuthZed)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

• Revolutionize Your Software Delivery with AI-Powered DevOps (Martin Reynolds, Harness)

Leading engineering teams are rethinking the way they build, secure, and deliver software faster, safer, and smarter than ever before. In this expert-led session, discover how AI-driven, modular DevOps platforms empower organizations to achieve:
- Faster innovation: with intelligent pipeline orchestration
- Continuous quality: through AI-powered testing
- Resilient delivery: with proactive reliability controls

Martin Reynolds, Field CTO at Harness, will share actionable strategies for automating governance, embedding security at every stage, and optimizing developer experience without compromise. Real-world examples and case studies will bring these concepts to life, showing exactly how top teams are delivering better software, faster." "With 30 years working in software, Martin has done a lot of things. Over that time working to deliver software at scale, to multiple platforms, with multiple technologies. He is now working with Harness, the modern software delivery platform to enable organizations and teams to deliver their software faster, more reliably, and more securely. Find him at
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinreynolds/

• Manage Kubernetes at Scale: Platforms, Infrastructures, and k0rdent (Martin Stadler, Mirantis)

Kubernetes has transformed the world of building applications as a container orchestrator, but managing Kubernetes infrastructures and developer platforms at scale remains a complex challenge for developers, DevOps engineers and the newly brewed persona of Platform Engineers.
Simplified ClusterAPI (CAPI) Adoption: ClusterAPI is powerful but notoriously complex, requiring hundreds of lines of YAML and deep expertise. k0rdent abstracts this complexity, making it easier for teams to adopt CAPI without a steep learning curve. This increases CAPI adoption in the Kubernetes community, accelerating infrastructure standardization.
Enhanced Kubernetes Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Operations: The ecosystem thrives on interoperability across clouds and on-prem. k0rdent provides a unified approach to managing Kubernetes clusters across AWS, Azure, GCP, vSphere, OpenStack, and beyond.
Strengthens GitOps and Declarative Infrastructure: GitOps is key to reliable, automated Kubernetes operations, but many struggle with applying it to cluster management.
k0rdent integrates GitOps practices, making declarative, version-controlled cluster deployments effortless. This reinforces best practices in Kubernetes automation, improving security and consistency. Join the talk to learn how k0rdent enables scalable, GitOps-driven Kubernetes automation and helps platform engineers build secure Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).

Martin is a Product Advisor at Mirantis leading efforts to address cloud-native state management challenges by developing advanced, scalable solutions that ensure consistent multi-cluster operations in dynamic environments. He is actively collaborating with engineering teams to refine and enhance cloud-native functionalities, focusing on operational consistency, performance, and the technical demands of large-scale deployments. His experience spans diverse technological landscapes, providing flexibility and resilience. The challenges, from development and productization to market launch and sales, offer continuous learning and problem-solving opportunities. He enjoys collaborative environments that value transparency and collective growth.
He was previously at ControlPlane, Weaveworks, Linaro,Canonical, RedHat, Ciena, and Alcatel. Find him at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinestadler/

• How Google built a Consistent, Global Authorization System with Zanzibar (and you can too!) (Sohan Maheshwar, AuthZed)

Google Zanzibar is the singular authorization service that powers permissions and sharing across all Google properties, including Docs, YouTube, and Cloud IAM. Creating a consistent, global-scale authorization system that can process ""more than 10 million client queries per second” is not a trivial task. The talk will cover how the paper lays out an engineer-friendly blueprint for building a highly scalable distributed system with flexible consistency guarantees.
This talk will start with foundational knowledge of Relationship Based Access Control (ReBAC) and then cover the technical implementations behind Zanzibar - How Google solved for correctness, scale and speed. The presentation will cover the different APIs for interacting with the system and also a deep-dive into how the “New Enemy” problem was solved. The talk will conclude with how you an use open source tools to build authZ into your application.

Sohan is a Lead Developer Advocate at AuthZed, based in the Netherlands. He started his career as a developer building mobile apps and has been living in the cloud since 2013, in companies such as Amazon, Fermyon and Gupshup. He is also an O' Reilly author, having created a course on Cloud Concepts for Everyone. He has always been interested in emerging technologies and how it shapes the world around us. Find him at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sohanmaheshwar/

Check out https://www.oicheryl.com/cloudnativelondon if you're interested in speaking or sponsoring.