Christmas Meetup with Platform Engineers in London

Christmas Edition! We encourage the wearing of your lovely Christmas sweaters.

Our London meet-up is back at the start of December, Christmas time! Join the Cloud Platform Engineering London’s meet-up for all things cloud, infrastructure, Kubernetes, and perhaps some mulled wine. Cheers!

What can you expect?

Some Christmas-themed treats! Food. Drinks. K8s. Good Conversation.

Talk 1: - Amir Tayabali, Terranetes: Streamlining Cloud Orchestration, Safeguarding Terraform

Amir is a Solutions Architect at Appvia and has spent the last few years working at the Bank of England on a large cloud adoption program. More recently he has focused on Appvia's open source projects (Terranetes, Tako, etc.) as well as their Wayfinder solution.

Terranetes allows teams running workloads inside a cluster to self-serve application dependencies and reuse the wealth of Terraform modules already written. Although there are a number of open-source controllers you could use that will run Terraform in Kubernetes, none of them address the "consequences" of delivering that outcome; the risks, cost, security implications, the general lack of checks, etc. Terranetes allows you to break this pattern by enabling the platform team to initially set the parameters around the self-service for developers.

Talk 2: - Stephen Crowley, De-Risk Your Release Process: Progressive Delivery with LaunchDarkly

Stephen has been working in LaunchDarkly for more than 2 years and prior to that New Relic for 5 years. He currently works as a Senior Solutions Engineer, driving change within clients to speed up their SDLC such as Vodafone UK.

Progressive Delivery acts as a risk-mitigating agent by controlling the audience that is exposed to each new change in your application. This control makes you feel safe when shipping code, in turn, giving you the freedom to deploy faster.

At its most basic, a feature flag is a control point, or if-then statement, you add to your code. These control points are quite powerful in that they separate deployments from releases. In other words, they let you deploy a new feature to your production environment without releasing it to users.
Among other things, this allows you to safely test new features in production and turn off problematic features without having to redeploy your entire application. Attaching flags to every new feature enables you to deliver faster, iterate more extensively, and virtually eliminate risk when shipping code.

Break

Talk 3: - Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz, Using Open-Source Software to Secure Cloud-Native Applications

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

-

*

------------------------------------------------

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 Anya (anya.salhi@appvia.io). We'd love any contributions and offers to talk.

We're back at the office of Appvia, right next to the Barbican Station. Unfortunately, we do not have wheelchair access to the building.