London DevOps

London DevOps is generously hosted at Lloyds Banking Group for our September event. We'll have two great talks, detailed below, and drinks and food for everyone. Please note that due to the security requirements of our hosts, you must provide your full name as shown on your ID and show this ID to enter the venue, so please make sure you enter this correctly when you sign up.

6:00pm - Arrival

6:30pm - Introductions

6:45pm - The Talks

Why Is Infrastructure Still Slowing Us Down? (Kief Morris)

Cloud and infrastructure automation was supposed to remove bottlenecks for digital businesses, but managing environments still takes far too much time and effort. Creating a self-service platform for defining and managing environments is not about selecting the right tool or adopting a single new practice. Organizations need to reconsider the shapes and workflows for their teams, architecture and implementation patterns for infrastructure, and strategies for testing, deploying, and updating systems.

Kief Morris has been helping scaleups and enterprises to use automation to streamline delivery of digital services since the dot-com days. He has written three editions of the book Infrastructure as Code, published by O'Reilly, and works with clients and partners globally as a Distinguished Engineer at Thoughtworks. Originally from Tennessee, Kief has lived in London for almost 30 years.

Building a Developer-Centric GenAI Platform (George Popescu-Craiova)

At Lloyds Bank, we integrate the latest LLMs and agentic systems at the speed they're invented, without sacrificing the security, scale or trust demanded by a bank serving 28 million customers. The result is a developer-first GenAI platform that empowers teams to ship AI-enabled features fast, design agentic workflows that work in production, and safely push the boundaries of what's possible inside a regulated environment. This talk reveals the playbook: the platform patterns, the re-usable components we empower our engineering teams with, the embedded safety and security mechanisms, the governance processes and the cultural shifts that allow us to innovate like a startup while operating like a bank. If you've ever wondered how to bring bleeding-edge AI into an environment built to stand the test of time, this is our journey.

George is an Engineering Lead within Lloyds' Personalised Experiences and Communications department working with a team building SRE functionality and AI capability. Previously, George was with Slalom Consulting where he worked on platform engineering and AI projects. He specialises in building high-performing, scalable systems that meet the needs of millions of users.

8:00pm - Close