DevOps Society - Manchester meetup March 2026
Details
## DevOps Society Meetup @ Colony King Street, (Manchester)
📍 Location: Colony Manchester (Colony King St, M2 4NH
Manchester)
🗓️ Date: Thursday 12th March
🕕 Time: Doors open at 6PM
🍕 Drinks, snacks, talks, and networking.
We’re excited to invite you to our next DevOps Society Manchester Meetup, proudly hosted by Colony.
This event brings together the DevOps, SRE, and cloud engineering community for an evening of honest conversations, real-world lessons, and networking with people from all backgrounds.
A huge thank you to Colony for hosting the event and supporting our growing community as always!
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## 🗓️ Format of the Meetup:
6:00pm – 6:30pm — Networking on arrival, with food and drinks
6:30pm – 7:10pm — First speaker + Q&A
7:10pm – 7:20pm — Break for refreshments and networking
7:20pm – 8:00pm — Second speaker + Q&A
8:00pm onwards — More networking at the venue, then at a nearby pub.
Timings can vary slightly depending on Q&A.
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We’re delighted to welcome two fantastic speakers to this DevOps Society Manchester meetup.
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## SPEAKER 1 – Benjamin Clark
Independent Software Consultant & Technical Leader
### Bio
Ben is a multi-discipline, independent software consultant and technical leader with experience across a wide range of sectors - spanning Embedded, Cloud, and ML - and companies from large multinationals to early-stage startups.
He enjoys staying hands-on, and when he’s not writing code you’ll usually find him halfway up a mountain. Ben also regularly hosts workshops, talks, and mentoring sessions in and around Manchester in-between frequenting its many restaurants and coffee shops.
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### 💬 Talk Title
Building AI-Powered ETL Pipelines with Bedrock and Terraform
### Talk Intro
Within this workshop, Ben will demonstrate how organisations can leverage generative AI to transform unstructured data into actionable analytics.
We’ll build an end-to-end ETL pipeline to extract useful metadata from book cover images and show how this can be achieved with simple data-structure driven Terraform, allowing teams to focus on delivering business value rather than organising the plumbing.
Whilst the demo will be built on AWS, advice and guidance will be given on how such a solution may be achieved in a cloud-agnostic fashion. The focus is on core principles and separation of concerns, rather than any single platform.
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## SPEAKER 2 – Ben Wilson
Senior Platform Engineer, Mews
### Bio
Ben is a Senior Platform Engineer at Mews with 13 years of experience in technology. After 9 years of attending meetups in Manchester, he’s now giving back to the community by sharing insights on the always-hot topics of cost reduction and observability.
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### 💬 Talk Title
Loggers to Legends 🦸♂️
### Talk Intro
Modern systems demand more than logs alone.
In this session, Ben explores the core pillars of observability and where logs, metrics, and traces each fit - and why logs alone aren’t enough in distributed systems.
You’ll learn:
- Why hospitality SaaS carries heightened expectations for uptime and performance
- What happens when 95% of observability data is debug logs
- How misaligned cost ownership stalls cultural change
- How wide events, tail sampling, and context propagation enable structured observability
- How Mews reduced observability costs by 70% while improving their engineering maturity
- A practical mental model for driving observability culture change across teams
This talk provides a clear framework for moving from reactive logging toward deliberate, context-rich instrumentation.
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Please RSVP to secure your spot!
Spaces are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
We’re really looking forward to bringing the community together in Manchester.
Our slack community - join in and introduce yourself!
Our Youtube Channel for regular podcasts with DevOps professionals + more DevOps content.
Website
To partner with us
Colony website - https://colonyco.work/