Cloud Native London, October 2025

Hi folks!

Welcome to our October 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
6:40 How To Put Swift in a Box: Container Images From Scratch With Swift Container Plugin (Euan Harris, Apple)
7:20 Break
7:30 Compliance for Dummies: A Primer for a Compliance-Minded Future (Chris Vermeulen, Container Solutions)
8:00 Smoke, Mirrors, and Metrics: A Kernel Detective's Guide to Cluster Resource Scaling (Nic Vermande, ScaleOps)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

How To Put Swift in a Box: Container Images From Scratch With Swift Container Plugin (Euan Harris, Apple)
Containers have changed how we build and run services. The days of FTPing a binary up to a server are gone, because our platforms expect to run containers. We build container images at every stage of development, whenever we want to test our services, and when we deploy them. If container images are what we need, could our development tools help us build them? Yes, they can! In this talk, we'll take a container image apart, see what makes it tick, then put it back together again from first principles - all using Swift!
Swift is a high performance, memory-safe language which is ideal for server-side development. We will:
- download a container image, take it apart by hand and explore what’s inside;
- cross-compile a Swift service effortlessly to different Linux distributions, on x86 or ARM, statically or dynamically linked, from development environments on macOS or Linux;
- use Swift's pluggable build system to produce container images efficiently and automatically for every build;
- test the image.
Containers are a universal building block of modern services. Even if you're not yet using Swift, these ideas and principles also underpin your current build and deployment workflow.
Euan builds cloud services and infrastructure using Swift at Apple. He enjoys working with containers, virtual machines, networks and interesting programming languages. Previously, Euan helped maintain Docker Swarm's overlay networking and HTTP ingress, and contributed to XenServer's open-source XenAPI control plane, the Xen hypervisor and OpenStack.

Compliance for Dummies: A Primer for a Compliance-Minded Future (Chris Vermeulen, Container Solutions)
Compliance doesn’t have to be complicated. At its heart, it’s about protecting people, organizations, and governments while building accountability, responsibility, and trust. This talk breaks down the basics—what compliance is, why it matters, and the key terms everyone should know. We’ll also explore why compliance can be so hard, and how new tools, automation, and standards like OSCAL can turn theory into practice. Whether you’re technical, managerial, or just compliance-curious, you’ll walk away with a clear, no-nonsense understanding of how compliance can drive clarity and trust instead of confusion.

Chris is an Engineer at Container Solutions, currently working on open source automation for Continuous Compliance and OSCAL.
He has had a decade long career in software development and DevOps at telcos, banks, and large retailers

Smoke, Mirrors, and Metrics: A Kernel Detective's Guide to Cluster Resource Scaling (Nic Vermande, ScaleOps)
Your autoscalers are fighting. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) scales out, Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) scales up, and KEDA drains the queue, all at once. The insidious results are resource thrash, unstable systems, and rising cloud bills. In this talk, we'll expose the root cause of this conflict: they're all making decisions based on incomplete and often misleading data. We'll trace the official metrics pipeline, from Linux kernel cgroups through the kubelet and Metrics API, and show exactly why CPU and memory averages hide the truth. We’ll then uncover the ground-truth signals that allow you to orchestrate them all with calm precision. Don't miss the live chaos, and the chance to finally make your metrics tell the whole truth.

Nic is an experienced hands-on technologist, evangelist and product owner who has been working in the fields of Cloud-Native technologies, Open Source Software, Virtualization and Datacenter networking for the past 20 years. Passionate about enabling users and building cool tech solving real-life problems, you'll often see him speaking at global tech conferences and online events, spreading the word and walking the walk with customers and users.

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