AWS User Group UK Meetup #77

Welcome to our May event. We're delighted to welcome Elena Lape, Founder, Holopin and Rupam Jha, Senior DevOps Engineer.

Elena takes an affectionate but honest look at the wonderfully chaotic reality of working with AWS, a platform that can do almost anything, but rarely in just one obvious way.

Rupam answers the question every fast-moving team faces: how do you stay secure, compliant, and audit-ready on AWS without creating bottlenecks for builders?

A big thank you to our sponsors Cloudscaler, Rayo & The Scale Factory

Programme:
18:00: Arrival, registration
18:15: Talks start
20:00: Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors.

Talk 1:
AWS: An Experience with Elena Lape

Those of us who care a lot about developer experience would certainly agree: AWS is, undeniably, an experience.

This session explores the quirks, overlaps, and “wait, why?” moments that make AWS both impressive and deeply relatable. Expect an affectionate look at the strange reality of using a platform that can do everything except explain itself briefly.

Elena is founder and Head of Engineering at Holopin, where she leads a platform used by 150,000+ software engineers worldwide. Before Holopin, she worked across several Silicon Valley scaleups building Kubernetes integrations, developer tooling, and cloud infrastructure, and has been building on AWS since 2016. Elena is deeply focused on developer experience. She spent part of her early career at GitHub, remains active in hackathon communities, and today serves on the W3C Advisory Board.

Talk 2:
Learn how to turn AWS security and compliance policies into automated, scalable, and auditable practices — without slowing down innovation with Rupam Jha

Many organisations struggle to enforce security and compliance consistently across AWS environments while scaling their workloads.

In this session, I’ll walk through practical strategies to secure AWS accounts, implement automated compliance controls, and simplify audits. Using real-world examples and best practices, attendees will leave with actionable techniques to protect data, streamline operations, and maintain regulatory readiness in the cloud.

Rupam is a Senior DevOps and Platform Engineer who enjoys building AWS platforms that are scalable, secure, and easy for teams to use. Her focus is on creating cloud-native environments with tools like AWS, Kubernetes, EKS, Terraform, and Vault, helping engineering teams ship faster and more confidently through automation, standardisation, and strong platform foundations.

A big part of what she does is reducing complexity for developers by building self-service infrastructure, improving delivery pipelines, and making platforms more reliable, observable, and cost-effective. She cares about security by design and operational excellence, and she believes infrastructure should feel like a product - something dependable, well-designed, and built to help teams move quickly without adding unnecessary risk.

Do you have a story to share?
If you are interested in speaking at one of our events, please check out our call for papers here.

We are advocates for greater inclusion & diversity in UK Tech and are especially keen to receive talk submissions from people in underrepresented groups. If you are interested in speaking at a future meetup but would like to discuss what to expect or need assistance, please contact our Inclusion & Diversity Lead Natalie Gray - graynataliej@gmail.com or DM her @natjgray

Check out our website for more information about our community. Remember to follow us @AWSUserGroupUK and on LinkedIn for the latest updates, and you can find videos of our past meetups here.