Cloud Native London, February 2026

Hi folks!

Welcome to our February 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 Stop Running Mystery Meat in Production (Jeroen van Erp, SUSE)
7:15 Platform Wars: The Battle Between Golden Paths and Spaghetti Pipelines (Prithvi Raj, Mirantis)
7:45 Break
8:00 Beyond Chatbots: How AI Agents and Humanoids Are Shaping a New Era (Akshya Prakkash, Urban Care Community)
8:30 Wrap up

Sponsors: TechShack, Cloudsmith, SUSE

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Stop Running Mystery Meat in Production (Jeroen van Erp, SUSE)
We have all been there. You need a database or a quick node environment, so you throw FROM node:latest into your Dockerfile and deploy. It works, but you have just introduced a black box into your Kubernetes cluster. For the Developer, it’s a quick fix. For the Platform Engineer, it’s a nightmare. Most upstream images from public registries are a roll of the dice. They come pre-packed with critical vulnerabilities, unknown binaries, and bloated libraries that you didn’t ask for and definitely don’t want running in your secure environment. In a world of Zero Trust, why are we trusting random upstream maintainers with the keys to our infrastructure?

Jeroen van Erp is a technology evangelist at SUSE, specializing in the observability platform. With a rich background spanning engineering, architecture and product management, Jeroen brings over a decade of experience in the DevOps space. Before joining SUSE, he played a pivotal role as technical slliance director at StackState, where he helped shape the future of observability. As a trainer and speaker, Jeroen is known for his ability to distill complex technical concepts into actionable insights. He is passionate about solving challenging technical problems, whether through mentoring or hands-on involvement. An active contributor to the open source community, Jeroen maintains several highly starred repositories. When he’s not diving into the latest technology trends, Jeroen enjoys spending time on his mini-farm, where he cares for his sheep and shares his love for rural life.
*https://www.linkedin.com/in/jvanerp/*

Platform Wars: The Battle Between Golden Paths and Spaghetti Pipelines (Prithvi Raj, Mirantis)
Internal developer platforms promised golden paths: streamlined, reliable routes for delivering software. Yet too often, they lead platform engineers into a tangled web of YAML, Bash scripts, and tool sprawl. The true crisis today isn't implementing the idea of platform engineering but navigating through platform democracy challenges. The true Darth Vader moments in platform engineering appear when good intentions turn dark: developer experience suffers, and open-source tools quietly become villains to velocity. This session aims to dive deeper into the open-source tooling and cloud-native strategies that mitigate the platform crisis. We’ll examine how to maintain the Jedi discipline of paved paths or fall into spaghetti-pipeline chaos while chasing the perfect delivery workflow. Through real-world stories and anti-patterns, we’ll explore the light and dark sides of OSS-powered platform engineering and help you uncover who the true Darth Vader of your stack might be.

Prithvi Raj is a Community Manager & Developer Advocate at Mirantis working with the Open Source Program Office team. He is a CNCF Ambassador with 5+ years of experience who helped scale a CNCF incubating project in LitmusChaos and runs the Platform & Resilience Engineering Meetup group. He is an active member of SIG Project Reviews and currently leads community efforts for the k0s project, k0rdent, OpenSDN, and other OSS initiatives Mirantis contributes to.
He is a co-organizer for KCD Bengaluru and previously organized Chaos Carnival, LitmusChaosCon and KCD Chennai. He was previously at Harness, ChaosNative, and MayaData.

Beyond Chatbots: How AI Agents and Humanoids Are Shaping a New Era (Akshya Prakkash, Urban Care Community)
Chatbots introduced the world to AI, but they are only the starting point. A new wave of systems - AI agents and humanoid technologies is shifting AI from conversation to action. This talk explores how AI is evolving beyond text-based interaction into systems that can perceive environments, make decisions and operate in the real world. Drawing from hands-on experience with agent-based AI projects and robotic platforms in community and care settings, we’ll examine what makes these systems different, the challenges of trust and why this shift represents a new era for human-AI interaction. Join this session to see how AI is beginning to act, not just respond.

BSc Computer Science Hons @ UOW & Software Developer at UCC
*LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshya-pv/*

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