Cloud Native London, March 2026

Hi folks!

Welcome to our March 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 Predictable Systems in an Unpredictable World (Behrad Babaee, Aerospike)
7:15 HAProxy Technologies Speaker TBC
7:45 Break
8:00 eBPF: Revolutionizing Cloud-Native Security (Alam Ahmed)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Predictable Systems in an Unpredictable World (Behrad Babaee, Aerospike)
Modern systems are challenged by volatility. Traffic patterns shift without warning, workloads evolve continuously, and failures are no longer exceptional events. In this environment, average performance is meaningless. What matters is whether systems behave predictably when conditions change.
This session explores how system design choices determine behavior under volatility. We will discuss why many modern architectures rely on fragile assumptions about steady-state workloads, cache locality, or predictable growth, and how those assumptions break down in real production environments. Through concrete examples and architectural discussion, we will examine what it means to design systems that remain predictable as load, access patterns, and scale evolve.
The goal is not to showcase tools or benchmarks, but to build a shared mental model for thinking about predictability as a first-class system property.

eBPF: Revolutionizing Cloud-Native Security (Alam Ahmed)
eBPF: Revolutionizing Cloud-Native Security from the Kernel Up
Cloud-native architectures have fundamentally broken traditional security models. While 67% of organizations now delay deployments due to Kubernetes security concerns, conventional tools remain blind to the dynamic, ephemeral nature of containers—operating from the outside looking in, missing critical kernel-level threats until it's too late.
This session reveals how eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is transforming cloud-native security by moving visibility and enforcement directly into the Linux kernel. Through real-world case studies from Meta, Google, and Cloudflare—where eBPF processes billions of packets per second and mitigates multi-terabit DDoS attacks—you'll discover how this technology delivers 10x performance improvements with <1% CPU overhead.
We'll explore the production-ready CNCF ecosystem (Falco, Tetragon, Cilium) and demonstrate practical security observability patterns: process execution monitoring, network correlation with Kubernetes context, file integrity tracking, and syscall anomaly detection. No kernel modules. No code changes. Complete visibility.
Whether you're battling container escapes, cryptojacking, or compliance gaps, this talk provides the architectural blueprint for security that matches the speed and scale of cloud-native—without sacrificing agility.

Alam Ahmed is a Junior Cloud & DevOps Engineer with NOC operations experience and a focus on cloud security. He has spoken at Elastic London and Yorkshire DevOps on Security as Code practices, contributes to open-source projects including Envoy AI Gateway, and is passionate about kernel-level observability and cloud-native defense.

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