DevOps Society's First Liverpool Meetup!

## DevOps Society Meetup with Barclays Eagle Labs (Liverpool)

📍 Location: Eagle Labs, Mann Island, Liverpool, L3 1BP
🗓️ Date: Thursday 19th March
🕕 Time: Doors open at 6PM
🍕 Drinks, snacks, technical talks, and networking.

We’re excited to invite you to our first ever DevOps Society Liverpool Meetup, proudly hosted and sponsored by Barclays Eagle Labs.

This event brings together the DevOps, SRE, and cloud engineering community for an evening of honest conversations, real-world lessons, and networking with people who’ve actually done the work. There is a Kubernetes theme for this meetup, with both talks having some Kubernetes spin on them!

A huge thank you to Eagle Labs for sponsoring this event and supporting our growing community.

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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 Liverpool meetup.

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## SPEAKER 1 – Zed Spencer-Milnes

Managing Director, Ziax

### Bio

Zed co-chairs the OKD Working Group, the community upstream to Red Hat OpenShift.

His day job is running Ziax, a studio that specialises in multiplayer gaming infrastructure. He’s been involved in technology for as long as he can remember — joining Ziax (then CubeCraft Games) at just 15 years old, where he learned how to scale systems and build resilience as the business grew and millions of players continued to play.

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### 💬 Talk Title

Help! I Started a Minecraft Server and Now Maintain a Kubernetes Distribution

### Talk Intro

What does it take to run gaming infrastructure supporting tens of thousands of concurrent players and millions of weekly users? How does this work in Kubernetes — and why would you bother?
In this session, Zed explores the motivations behind Ziax’s cloud-native journey, what attracted them to OKD — an opinionated Kubernetes distribution — and how that journey led to contributing to and maintaining parts of the project.
This talk offers real-world insights into large-scale infrastructure, resilience engineering, and operating Kubernetes in high-demand environments.

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## SPEAKER 2 – Rafael Natali

DevOps Technical Lead, Marionete

### Bio

Rafael Natali has 20 years of experience in the IT industry, specialising as a System Administrator and DevSecOps professional. Throughout his career, he has developed extensive expertise in designing, operating, and troubleshooting solutions that prioritise scalability and reliability.
He is highly experienced in automation and continuous integration and delivery, has been working with Kubernetes since 2018, and was recognised as a Kubestronaut in 2024. Currently, Rafael leads a team implementing a hybrid streaming data and analytics platform for a major UK insurance company.

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### 💬 Talk Title

I Fought the Pod and the Pod Won: Breaking and Defending Kubernetes from Within

### Talk Intro

Kubernetes gives us abstraction and power — but with great YAML comes great responsibility.
In this session, Rafael walks through live demonstrations of real-world misconfigurations that allow attackers to escape containers and tamper with host systems. You’ll see what happens when Pods run in privileged mode, use hostPath volumes carelessly, or retain excessive Linux capabilities.
The talk also covers:

• Detecting attacks in real time using Falco
• Enforcing security controls with Pod Security Admission
• Understanding the risks of common Kubernetes misconfigurations
• Practical ways to strengthen cluster security

If you’ve ever wondered “what’s the worst that could happen?” — this session answers that with receipts.

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Please RSVP to secure your spot.

For any questions, please email hello@thedevopsociety.com