Cloud Native London, March 2026

Hi folks!

Welcome to our March Cloud Native London meetup! 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 Predictable Systems in an Unpredictable World (Behrad Babaee, Aerospike)
7:15 Observability with HAProxy: detecting what is not working and why (Baptiste Assmann, HAProxy Technologies)
7:45 Break
8:00 eBPF: Revolutionizing Cloud-Native Security (Alam Ahmed)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Predictable Systems in an Unpredictable World (Behrad Babaee, Aerospike)
Modern systems are challenged by volatility. Traffic patterns shift without warning, workloads evolve continuously, and failures are no longer exceptional events. In this environment, average performance is meaningless. What matters is whether systems behave predictably when conditions change.
This session explores how system design choices determine behavior under volatility. We will discuss why many modern architectures rely on fragile assumptions about steady-state workloads, cache locality, or predictable growth, and how those assumptions break down in real production environments. Through concrete examples and architectural discussion, we will examine what it means to design systems that remain predictable as load, access patterns, and scale evolve.
The goal is not to showcase tools or benchmarks, but to build a shared mental model for thinking about predictability as a first-class system property.

Behrad Babaee is a software engineer who leads Product Marketing at Aerospike, shaping positioning and go-to-market strategy for real-time data systems in the AI era.
He began his career building scalable, distributed applications for organisations including Barclays and Credit Suisse, before moving into architecture and field leadership roles at Aerospike and DataStax.
Today, he combines deep engineering expertise with strategic product leadership, focusing on how organisations design systems that remain predictable, resilient and performant under real-world volatility.

Observability with HAProxy: detecting what is not working and why (Baptiste Assmann, HAProxy Technologies)
Is it the network, the app, or the database? In complex microservices environments, "mean time to innocence" is a critical metric for platform engineers. HAProxy sits at the convergence of these traffic flows, providing a unique vantage point to answer the ultimate observability question: "WTF is going on?".
We'll do a deep dive into the metrics that matter, so you can detect anomalies before users complain. You will learn:

• The difference between monitoring and observability in a reverse proxy context.
• How to access HAProxy’s detailed logs, stats, and stick-tables.
• How to analyze the "life of a request" using precise timers to pinpoint latency sources.
• How to use HAProxy’s observability features to fix real-world issues (demo)
• How HAProxy Fusion provides centralized observability and automation for enterprise deployments at scale.

Baptiste Assmann is Director of Product at HAProxy Technlogoes. He spent his carreer on networking and high performance architecture. Today, he plays a key role on HAProxy's ecosystem evolution: from bare metal to Kubernetes and from load balancing to advanced security at scale and always looking forward for what's next!

eBPF: Revolutionizing Cloud-Native Security (Alam Ahmed)
eBPF: Revolutionizing Cloud-Native Security from the Kernel Up
Cloud-native architectures have fundamentally broken traditional security models. While 67% of organizations now delay deployments due to Kubernetes security concerns, conventional tools remain blind to the dynamic, ephemeral nature of containers—operating from the outside looking in, missing critical kernel-level threats until it's too late.
This session reveals how eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is transforming cloud-native security by moving visibility and enforcement directly into the Linux kernel. Through real-world case studies from Meta, Google, and Cloudflare—where eBPF processes billions of packets per second and mitigates multi-terabit DDoS attacks—you'll discover how this technology delivers 10x performance improvements with <1% CPU overhead.
We'll explore the production-ready CNCF ecosystem (Falco, Tetragon, Cilium) and demonstrate practical security observability patterns: process execution monitoring, network correlation with Kubernetes context, file integrity tracking, and syscall anomaly detection. No kernel modules. No code changes. Complete visibility.
Whether you're battling container escapes, cryptojacking, or compliance gaps, this talk provides the architectural blueprint for security that matches the speed and scale of cloud-native—without sacrificing agility.

Alam Ahmed is a Junior Cloud & DevOps Engineer with NOC operations experience and a focus on cloud security. He has spoken at Elastic London and Yorkshire DevOps on Security as Code practices, contributes to open-source projects including Envoy AI Gateway, and is passionate about kernel-level observability and cloud-native defense.

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