DevOps North East @ Opencast - Rise & fall of Infra-as-Code & DevOps meets $$$

For our October 2024 meetup DevOps North East are at the home of award-winning Opencast in Hoults Yard, Walker Road, Newcastle. As usual we will have two DevOps talks as well as food and drinks in the middle.
Talk 1
Our first talk features Paul Stack talking about the "Rise and (potential) fall of Infrastructure-as-code"
Infrastructure-as-Code is synonymous to DevOps for a large portion of the ecosystem. Its evolution over the past 15 years has been incredible. The ecosystem has exploded with new tools each promising to be better than the other. The development of the ecosystem has brought both pain and pleasure for users. The why of needing to use the tool remains constant but the how has become deeply complex. We have continued to try and fit new tools to the shape of a delivery pipeline that hasn't evolved in many years.
In this talk, Paul is going to reflect on where Infrastructure as Code has taken us and what lessons we should carry forward as we continue to pursue excellence in delivering products and systems to our end users. It won't be a slug fest but it will definitely have some spicy takes on the bets that the current tools are making and how that relates to the usage and extension of those systems for users.
Paul Stack is an infrastructure coder and has spoken at various events throughout the world about his passion for continuous integration, continuous delivery and good operational procedures and why they should be part of what developers and system administrators do on a day to day basis. He believes that reliably delivering software is more important as its development. Paul’s passions are the DevOps and Continuous Delivery movements and how they help the entire business and its customers.
Talk 2
Our second talk has Martin Samuels talking about "FinOps - DevOps meets Dollars"
FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams. Done well it can optimise your investment in cloud. When poorly implemented, it can be a time-consuming and frustrating exercise in unnecessary spending!
Martin Samuels is an independent DevOps consultant with 17 years of experience and an extensive business continuity, disaster recovery and data resiliency background. He specialises in AWS infrastructure, platform engineering, and DevOps practices. Notable clients/assignments include DWP, News UK, Northern Gas Networks, The Hotel Collection and Melius Cyber.