Name: DevOps Society Manchester Event @ Colony Fabrica
Start: 2025-10-09T17:00:00.000Z
Location: Colony Fabrica

## DevOps Society Meetup – Wednesday 1st October @6PM

Location: Zilch Offices, London - 111 Buckingham Palace Rd, London SW1W 0SR

We’re excited to invite you to our next DevOps Society Meetup, hosted by Zilch in London. This event brings together the DevOps and cloud-native community for an evening of conversation, learning, and networking.

A huge thank you to Zilch for sponsoring this event, and for providing the venue, refreshments, and support!

***

### Format of the Meetup:

6:00pm – 6:30pm — Networking on arrival, with pizza and drinks provided by Zilch
6:30pm – 7:10pm — First speakers will take to the stage
7:10pm – 7:20pm — Break for refreshments and networking
7:20pm – 8:00pm — Second speaker will take to the stage
8:00pm onwards — More networking at the venue and then at a nearby pub

Timings can vary depending on the length of the Q&A after each talk!

***

We are delighted to welcome three fantastic speakers to our event at Zilch, across two talks.

***

### SPEAKERS 1 & 2 – Nick Gilbert & Sean Hederman

**Nick Gilbert – DevOps Engineer III at Zilch**

Nick Gilbert is a Senior DevOps Engineer with a decade of experience working across public and private cloud systems. He has worked extensively with CI/CD and immutable infrastructure, focusing on modernising on-premise solutions into cloud-native architectures. Since joining Zilch, Nick has enhanced system capabilities to shorten feedback loops, improve the developer experience, and increase the reliability of CI/CD pipelines.

**Sean Hederman – CTO at Zilch**

With nearly three decades of experience in technology delivery and leadership, Sean Hederman has been instrumental in shaping Zilch’s technological evolution as Chief Technology Officer. He previously held senior roles in technology and DevOps at leading organisations, gaining deep expertise in building and scaling enterprise-grade systems. At Zilch, Sean designed and built the company’s foundational technology and platforms, scaling the team from just a few engineers to more than 120 specialists across multiple disciplines and regions. Originally from South Africa and now based in London, Sean is a recognised thought leader in AI and a leading voice in software engineering, architecture, and DevSecOps.

***

#### Talk Title: ZOE and Zephyrs: An Overview of Our Journey to Ephemeral Environments at Zilch

Nick and Sean will take us through the architecture, challenges, and triumphs of establishing ephemeral environments at Zilch.

They’ll share insights into:

* How Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and AWS power ephemeral environments at scale, at Zilch.
* The organisational and technical hurdles they had to overcome
* The wins (and lessons learned) from adopting ephemeral environments in a fast-paced fintech environment

Expect a candid walkthrough of what it really takes to make ephemeral environments reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly.

***

### SPEAKER 3 – Dhruv Parekh

**Senior DevOps Engineer at EDF**

Dhruv Parekh is a Senior DevOps Engineer at EDF, specialising in cloud engineering and automation. With over 4 years of experience in building scalable DevOps solutions, Dhruv focuses on driving automation strategies that go beyond the basics of infrastructure as code, bringing a holistic approach to engineering efficiency and business value. Dhruv is also a valued member of our community, holding the "Ambassador for Terraform" title!

***

#### Talk Title: Automating Beyond Terraform

When people hear DevOps automation, many think of Terraform plans and YAML pipelines. While powerful, they’re only part of the picture.
In this talk, Dhruv explores what it means to automate *beyond* Terraform:

* Using Python to stitch together cross-cloud tasks and business logic Terraform can’t reach
* Building dashboards with Power BI to bring automation full circle, telling the story of your platform
* Thinking like a solution architect to design scalable, observable automations that deliver lasting value, not just quick fixes

By the end of this talk, you’ll see automation not just as code, but as a way to design the *entire lifecycle of change*, from idea to insight.

***

Please RSVP to book your spot. Space is limited, so it’s first come, first served! We look forward to seeing you all there.

Ben & Vytas – Co-organisers.

DevOps Society

Vytas Jelinskas

Ben Whitmarsh

meetruona

Sehindemi Ajayi

Jonathon Bartlett

Matei Dragu

Dipali Patel

Suhaib Saeed

Eduard  Popescu 

Ravi

Rodrey Goite

Pradeep Kumar

Atharv Vashishth

Farrah K

Quadri Aminu

Khyati

kishan9687

Wojciech HM

James Abell

DevOps Society London Event @Zilch

Zilch

**DevOps Society Meetup – Thursday 9th October @6PM**

Location: Colony Fabrica, 269 Great Ancoats St, Manchester, M4 7DB

We’re excited to invite you to our next DevOps Society Meetup, hosted at Colony Fabrica in Manchester. This event brings together the DevOps, AI, and cloud-native community for an evening of conversation, learning, and networking.

A huge thank you to Colony for providing the venue, and support!

***

**Format of the Meetup:**
6:00pm – 6:30pm — Networking on arrival, with pizza and drinks provided by ReVybe IT.
6:30pm – 7:10pm — First speaker will take to the stage
7:10pm – 7:20pm — Break for refreshments and networking
7:20pm – 8:00pm — Second speaker will take to the stage
8:00pm onwards — More networking at the venue and then at a nearby pub

Timings can vary depending on the length of the Q&A after each talk!

***

We are delighted to welcome two fantastic speakers to our event at Colony Fabrica.

***

**SPEAKER 1 - Matt Houghton -** Data & AI Architect @ CDL

AWS Community Builder \| AWS Ambassador \| AWS Gold Jacket Certification All\-Star
Matt is an Architect at CDL Software, where he spends his time undertaking R&D and working with customers and internal teams on their most complex challenges. He is an AWS Community Builder, AWS Ambassador, and holds every AWS certification. In 2021, Qlik recognised Matt as one of their 50 Global Luminaries for his measurable impact with data and community contributions.

***

**Talk Title: Ensure the Security and Reliability of Your GenAI Workloads with Amazon Bedrock**
In this session, Matt will explore emerging risks associated with GenAI-based workloads and share strategies for testing, securing, and monitoring them using Amazon Bedrock.
He’ll highlight and demonstrate some of the latest features announced for Amazon Bedrock, showcasing how they can help you design more effective and reliable GenAI workloads.

***

**SPEAKER 2 - Ben Clark -** DevOps Consultant
Ben Clark is a DevOps consultant with over a decade of experience leading platform engineering and automation across large enterprises. He specialises in distributed systems, ML-Ops, and data engineering. Ben also maintains open-source projects at [sudoblark.com](http://sudoblark.com) and is pursuing a BSc in Computing and IT, focusing on the mathematics of machine learning and its application to constrained and embedded systems.

***

**Talk Title: A Hands-On Introduction to Quantisation: From Neural Weights to Edge Deployment**
This session builds a working understanding of neural network weights using simple perceptrons, then explains how quantisation reduces model size and computation.
Ben will walk through the practical steps of deploying a quantised model to a Raspberry Pi, demonstrating how these techniques make neural networks viable on constrained hardware.

***

Please RSVP to book your spot. Space is limited, so it’s first come, first served! We look forward to seeing you all there.

Ben & Vytas – Co-organisers.

Shayaan Mirza

Kopal gupta

James Babington

Daisie-Marie Twist

Romeo S

Tim Rogers

Samuel Ojo

Matthew Turner 

GEORGII LESNICHENKO

Matt Houghton

Ebun

Bunamin Adams

Martin A

Vikas Sharma

David Underwood

Abdullah Tayeh

Patrick Stephens

Patrick Chmarzynski

DevOps Society Manchester Event @ Colony Fabrica

Colony Fabrica

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