Cloud Native London, January 2026

Hi folks!

Welcome to our January Cloud Native London meetup, our first of 2026! Join us to hear from our three great speakers and network with your fellow techies over pizza and drinks, or alternatively chat and following along on Youtube!

6:00 Pizza and drinks
6:30 Welcome
6:45 Kyle Johnson, Flagsmith (Talk TBC)
7:15 Stop Using CI as Your Testing Strategy (Ole Lensmar, Testkube)
7:45 Break
8:00 Why Cloud Cost Assessment Must Come Before Cloud-Native Build (Mawuko Jeffrey Wilson, BrassicaPay)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Stop Using CI as Your Testing Strategy (Ole Lensmar, Testkube)
CI/CD pipelines were never designed to be the center of your testing strategy, but that’s exactly what they’ve become. As teams adopt microservices, containers, GitOps, and progressive delivery, traditional testing-in-CI is increasingly mismatched with how software actually gets built and deployed. Long-running CI pipelines struggle to keep up with AI-generated code, ephemeral environments, asynchronous deployments, and infrastructure that evolves as fast as application code.
In this talk, we’ll challenge the assumption that “testing happens in CI.” You’ll learn how cloud-native teams validate code and infrastructure in dynamic environments, using event-driven mechanism to inject testing into the SDLC, both before and after CI has done its job.
Testing isn’t broken. The way we’ve wired it into CI/CD is. It’s time to rethink where, how and when tests need to be running in a cloud-native world."

Ole started building with APIs in the late 90:ies and has since then worked with multiple open source technologies and startups, most notably as creator of SoapUI in 2004 and Chairman of the OpenAPI Initiative in 2015. He joined Testkube at its inception in 2021 and is now entirely focused on helping organisations bridge the gap to Continuous Testing in a Cloud-Native world. When not at his laptop he can be found playing a guitar or riding a bike, but rarely both at the same time. Find him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/olensmar/

Why Cloud Cost Assessment Must Come Before Cloud-Native Build (Mawuko Jeffrey Wilson, BrassicaPay)
Many organisations adopt the cloud-nativve architectures with scalability and speed in mind; yet only realise after launching that cloud costs have spiralled beyond expectations and many issues. This talk will explore why cost surprises are so common in cloud-native journeys and argues that cost assessment must happen before migration, before architecture decisions, and before code is written.
Drawing from real-world consulting experience and industry research, the session examines how early design choices-such as service selection, consumption models, environments, and governance-directly influence long-term cloud spend across AWS, Azure, and GCP (others). We will also look at why cost alerts, budgets, and subscriptions-while valuable-are reactive controls, not substitutes for upfront cost modelling.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for embedding cost assessment into cloud-native planning, enabling teams to build scalable systems without cost becoming an after-the-fact shock. And having to explain figures and cloud spend when costs goes high. This will also help team members to be accountable is RACI models or framework are adopted in addition to cost control strategies.

Mawuko Jeffrey Wilson is a Cloud Security Lead (Engineer) and Architect with hands-on experience designing, securing, and optimising cloud-native platforms across fintech, cost-control, public sector, and product-led technology environments. He specialises in cloud governance, cost-aware architecture (FinOps), and security-first design, helping organisations align cloud adoption with financial sustainability. Mawuko has worked across AWS, Azure, and GCP ecosystems, supporting migration planning, cloud security controls, and operational optimisation. Alongside industry work, he loves networking, learning new things, and sharing, and bringing a data-driven lens to cloud decision-making-particularly around cost forecasting, security, risk, governance, and operational efficiency.

Check out https://www.oicheryl.com/cloudnativelondon if you're interested in speaking or sponsoring.