Birmingham DevOps Society Meetup 2026

Welcome to our first Birmingham meetup of 2026, hosted and sponsored by AND Digital in Brindley Place!

Details below:
Location: The Foundry, 6 Brindley Pl, Birmingham, B1 2JB.
Time: Doors open at 6PM
Drinks, Pizza, talks, and networking.

We’re excited to invite you to our 6th DevOps Society Meetup of 2026, proudly sponsored by AND Digital.
This event has two technical talks, which can be a fit for anybody. There will be some really technical bits in both talks, but also some high-level bits too, with two really exciting speakers lined up for this one in Jim and Toli.

Format of the Meetup:
6:00pm – 6:30pm — Networking on arrival, with food and drinks provided by AND Digital.
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.

SPEAKER #1 - Jim Hanmer - Principal Solutions Architect @ AWS

Bio
Jim Hanmer is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, where he advises startup CTOs on cloud and AI architecture. A builder at heart and distributed systems practitioner for over 25 years, he collaborates closely with AWS service teams to translate hard-won engineering lessons into practical guidance for teams building at any scale.

Talk Title:

Behind the Curtain: Lessons from Building the World's Largest Distributed Systems at Amazon
For 20 years, Amazon's engineers have shaped the design principles behind some of the world's largest distributed systems. This talk distils the lessons that matter most.
We'll explore the design principles that tackle the hardest challenges in distributed computing, including cell-based architectures, regional redundancy, static stability, and targeted fallback strategies. We'll also look at why operational observability and thorough instrumentation aren't optional extras, but survival skills when you're running systems at scale.
Whether you're building for millions of users or dozens, you'll leave with principles you can apply to your own systems.

SPEAKER #2 - Apostolis (Toli) Apostolidis - Lead Architect @ Flipdish & Datadog Ambassador

Bio:

Toli is a Software Engineering Practitioner who believes that learning and working together are catalysts for high-performing software-first teams who care about how their software serves their customers.
Toli's career began in the field of maths and physics, which led him into the world of software engineering, where he spent his formative first few years learning the craft while writing algorithms for solving large-scale "travelling-sales-person" problems across the globe. He has since worked with Brent from The Phoenix Project for a B2B energy company, the initial core team at cinch to build the fastest-growing unicorn in UK startup history, while he is currently helping Flipdish build the next generation of restaurant tech.

Throughout this journey, Toli fell in love with DevOps, Observability and Team Topologies, while he discovered a new passion for serverless, event-driven socio-technical architectural paradigms and product thinking.

Talk title:

Pay for What You Use, Use What You Pay For: Frugal Architecture with Datadog Cloud Costs

Description:
We've all seen that Slack message. Someone senior forwards the monthly cloud bill with a single line: "Can someone take a look at this? Why has it spiked so much?" Nobody knows. Even worse, nobody owns it. And that's exactly the issue.
At Flipdish, we fixed that by bringing cloud and SaaS cost data into Datadog: the same tool our engineers already use for logs, metrics and traces. Now spend wasn't a finance report. It was a dashboard any engineer could pull up, attribute to a service, and act on like any other signal.
In this talk, I'll share what we found when we actually looked, how we embed cost awareness into architecture reviews and incident response, and why AI workloads are making this discipline urgent, where a single runaway prompt can spike your bill overnight in a way no latency alert would catch. If you can alert on a p99 spike, you can alert on a cost spike. Same signal. Different dimension.

Please register now to book your spot!

Location - The Foundry, 6 Brindley Pl, Birmingham, B1 2JB.
Sponsors - AND Digital.