DevOps Exchange May @ Monzo

Join us on Tuesday 20th May for our next DevOps Exchange London event, where our good friends at Monzo will be hosting us at their London HQ in the City.

For this event, we have brought together three leading companies; Docker, Syntasso, and Stackegy, to unpack the latest breakthroughs and game changing trends reshaping the DevOps landscape.

Ivan Pedrazas (Docker) will dive into Docker’s AI development stack, sharing lessons learned from building AI Agents and their new MCP Catalogue. He’ll walk through when to use RAGs, agentic workflows, or full blown custom agents. Plus the challenges of moving from local development to production.

Paula Kennedy (Syntasso) will explore how internal platforms can scale DevOps without overwhelming platform teams, sharing how "team topologies" and collaborative models can boost developer productivity and reduce complexity across the board.

Simon Forster (Stackegy) will reveal how Cloud Native tech can drive real business value, with practical strategies for tackling churn, disaster recovery, and infrastructure modernisation.

As always, our format features three 20 minute talks, but please note the earlier schedule for this event: doors open at 6:15pm, and talks will begin promptly at 6:50pm to allow time for Q&A after each session.

We’ll be wrapping up by 8:15pm sharp. Drinks & refreshments will of course be available throughout.

Agenda:
6:15pm - Doors open

6:50pm - Ivan Pedrazas, Kubernetes Architect @ Docker
"Build, Ship, Run for AI Agents"

At Docker, we have been building AI Agents and recently a whole new MCP Catalogue that provides tools to those agents.

I will provide an overview of our AI development stack and the challenges when building Agents. I'll go over a few use cases and what kind of Agentic workflows are better suited for the task: when to use a RAG, when a workflow powered by AI is best suited, or when to go all in and build your own AI Agent.

Last, but not least, I go over the challenges of going from local development to production.

Bio: Ivan Pedrazas has been designing and building distributed systems for more than 20 years. In the last few months, he’s been doing research about complexity theory and cognitive load in the production and management of software components.

7:15pm - Paula Kennedy, Co-Founder @ Syntasso
"Switch Your Internal Platform to Multi-Player Mode"

Platform Engineering is increasingly being understood as a way to scale DevOps within organisations and enable developers to go faster by reducing cognitive load and complexity. But this often doesn’t remove the complexity that developers face, it only shifts it onto the Platform Team.

In this talk, Paula will describe how teams can collaborate together to share services and tools, as well as best practices. This will include a summary of team types and interaction modes as described in the popular book, Team Topologies. Paula will include examples of cases where this approach is working to improve developer productivity and will also provide some suggestions of how teams could try this out within their own organisations.

Bio: Paula is Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer of Syntasso. With nearly 25 years experience in tech, Paula is a CNCF Ambassador, a Team Topologies Advocate and has spoken at several conferences including QCon, KubeCon, and DevOpsDays.

7:40pm - Simon Forster, Technical Architect @ Stackegy
"Cloud Native Solutions: Demonstrating ROI and Business Impact"

Simon Forster will discuss the practical aspects of implementing Cloud Native solutions, aiming to help technical professionals understand and communicate the business value and return on investment (ROI) of these technologies.

Simon will outline common challenges and financial uncertainties associated with Cloud Native adoption, providing three practical examples demonstrating how such solutions can address business problems like high churn rates, disaster recovery, and infrastructure modernisation. He will stress the importance of understanding customer needs, technical landscapes, and asking "why" to effectively champion Cloud Native initiatives.

Bio: Simon Forster is a CNCF Ambassador and cloud native technology architect and engineer based in London. Simon has extensive experience working in heavily regulated financial institutions on the design, delivery and security of critical cloud native applications. He has a specific focus on ensuring cloud native technologies deliver against business goals.

We hope to see many of you at this event!

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Thanks,
Leah, Tony and the DOXLON team

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