DevOps Society Manchester Q1 2025

Details

Our first Manchester DevOps Society meetup event of 2025 has arrived! We are delighted to be hosted by Colony again, but at their fantastic Fabrica venue this time.

In this event, we will be hearing from two exciting speakers.

Benjamin Clark, is returning to give our community a talk about scaling CI/CD, whilst Akash is a familiar face within our community, who will be speaking about deploying open-source LLM models, with a Kubernetes twist.

Format of the meetup event will be as follows:
6pm – 6:30pm - Networking on arrival coupled with pizza and drinks provided by ReVybe IT.
6:30pm – 7pm – First speaker will take to the stage.
7pm – 7:10pm – Break for refreshments and networking
7:10pm – 7:40pm – Second speaker will take to the stage.
8pm onwards – Networking at event space and a local pub afterwards.
We are delighted to welcome 2 speakers to our second Manchester event.

#1 – Benjamin Clark – DevOps Consultant
Ben begun work in the tech industry at 17, and over a decare later he has since founded and lead DevOps teams across multiple large organisations as both an employee and independent contractor. With a strong focus on elevating teams from just developing software to properly engineering software as a discipline, he believes strongly that the Software Development Lifecycle should apply across both Infrastructure and Application stacks.

Title – CI/CD at Scale, without the pain!

Ben will be speaking about how standardisation of CI/CD can accelerate team productivity, remove ambiguity around pipeline purposes and component deployment, and ultimately lead to powerful in-house observability solutions for the generation of analytical insights into the performance and operation of your chosen CI/CD platform

#2 – Akash Joshi - Senior Full-stack Engineer @Rocket Connect

A Senior Software Engineer at RConnect, Akash is a self-taught programmer who started his journey from playing video-games to developing them. Spending the last couple of years developing software solutions at trading firms as well as Meta.
Akash spends a lot of time experimenting with AI tools, using them in his day-to-day.

Title - Deploying LLM-based inference pipelines to Kubernetes

AI models are ubiquitous. We've already been pestering ChatGPT for answers to questions for the last couple years. However, did you know that the same technology which powers ChatGPT can also run on your machine, completely free of cost? In this talk, we'll dive deep into running the Language Models on your machine. We'll also explore serving an HTTP API on top of these models, so you can build a software application on top of them. Finally, we'll learn how we can use the power of Kubernetes, to develop them on your machine, and automate deployments to various cloud platforms. This talk empowers you to deploy any open-source LLM model to cloud platforms in a distributed manner, enabling you to be the AI Champion of your organisation!

P.S. Please provide full name and email address for access to the Colony Fabrica event space.
Address - 269 Great Ancoats St, Greater, Manchester M4 7DB