Cloud Platform Engineering London

 
 
 

Our London meet-up is back this Summer! Join the Cloud Platform Engineering London’s meet-up for all things cloud, infrastructure and Kubernetes.

What can you expect?
Some Summer themed treats! Food. Drinks. K8s. Good Conversation.

Talk 1: I heard you saying that platform engineering is hard

Ivan Pedrazas (@ipedrazas) - Docker

Bio: More Dev than Ops - Kubernetes London Meetup co-organiser. ADHD, community, mentorship and cake (not in that order). Principal Engineer at Docker.

Talk 2: How an open source overlay network maintained business continuity while data centres ‘melted

Philip Griffiths, VP Advocacy and Product - NetFoundry

The UK is not known for sunny weather, but in the Summer of 2022, an extra hot day cause the Oracle Cloud London (as well as Google’s) data centre to suffer a partial meltdown. Less critical workloads were stopped including network services such as VPNs and bastions. Luckily, a UK MSP had already implemented an open source overlay network which meant they and their customers could continue to get access and administer to their services. Unlike others, they suffered no business downtime. This session will explore this story and take a look at the project which saved the day, OpenZiti. We will also take a peek at how other organisations are adding delicious Ziti to their Kubernetes deployments and platforms to implement zero trust networking.

Bio: Philip Griffiths is VP Advocacy and Product for NetFoundry (the company behind OpenZiti) and regularly speaks at events from DevOps to IoT to Cyber Security. Prior to this, he worked for Atos IT Services in various roles. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two daughters.

Talk 3: Using Open-Source Software to Secure Cloud-Native Applications

Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz, Senior Product Manager Tigera
Nell Jerram, Principal Software Engineer Tigera

Cloud-Native microservices applications bring immense advantages for many software application needs, but they also bring their own security challenges. Ephemeral workloads appear and disappear, workload network addressing is transient, and traditional firewalls can't police the data path effectively.

Open-source tools orchestration tools such as Kubernetes define a NetworkPolicy application-centric construct but they do not implement it; In this session we'll learn how, with a change of tools and mindset, open-source software can help to implement security for cloud-native applications whilst still allowing the user to benefit from all the advantages.

Security is stored declaratively alongside the application, tested as part of the build pipeline, all with a shift-left paradigm in mind to ensure that everyone development agility is not restricted but mistakes can't get far.

We'll put it all together and briefly showcase a zero-trust Kubernetes network environment, too!

Malavika's Bio: Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz works at Tigera as a Senior Product Manager. She leads the cloud platform and product-led growth initiative to help organisations of all sizes secure their Kubernetes clusters. She is passionate about building software to make security easy and accessible for organisations of all sizes, solving tough technical problems with empathy, good design, and data.

Nell's Bio: Nell Jerram is a Principal Software Engineer with Tigera and was the second engineer ever to work on Calico in 2014. She lives in Cambridge and does a lot of singing with chamber choirs.

Talk 4: Using SPIFFE and OPA to Authenticate and Authorize Workloads

Charlie Egan, Developer Advocate @ Styra

What’s the highest value platform feature you can offer your Kubernetes tenants? It might be standardizing workload identity and policy controls. In this session, we will discuss desirable properties for a workload identity and present a modern architecture built on SPIFFE and cert-manager which uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) for policy decisions. This should leave you with actionable ideas to help you re-evaluate your workload identity functionality and security posture.

Charlie's bio: Charlie has been working with in the Cloud Native space since 2018. He currently works as a Developer Advocate at Styra and on the OPA project. Charlie is interested in authentication and authorization across the stack.
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Who are these events for?
Platform Engineers
Cloud Engineers
DevOps Engineers
DevOps Managers
K8s Developers
... and anyone interested in building, scaling or upgrading their cloud infrastructure

Would you happen to have something to talk about?
Please contact Jack or Salman. We'd love any contributions and offers to talk.

Unfortunately, due to building restrictions, there is no wheelchair access to the venue.