London Platform User Group (LOPUG)

For our November meetup, we're back at the fabulous Accurx offices. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers, the agenda will be:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking
• 7:00pm - Welcome & Housekeeping
• 7:15pm - Talk 1: Building a contract-driven data platform

What if we had a data platform that focussed on producers of data, i.e. software engineers, and empowered them to publish data at the right quality so it can be used to drive business goals, without burdening software engineers with data management tasks?
Andrew will share how he took ideas from software and platform engineering to build a self-service data platform that enabled software engineers to publish quality data for consuming services, models, and analytics, while automating the management and governance tasks of data management, driven by data contracts.
Because data platforms are platforms too.

Speaker: Andrew Jones, Principal Engineer and author
Andrew is a Principal Engineer, author, and trainer who loves building platforms, especially data platforms that create real business value. He’s all about designing efficient and well-governed systems that make it easier to produce and use quality data. Andrew coined the term "data contracts" and in 2023 wrote the well-received book, Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts.

• 7.45pm - food, more drinks & networking
• 8.00pm - Talk 2: KubeCon Keynote Recap - "Beyond Operations: Scaling Platform Engineering"

Cloud native has always been about more than technology. Each wave of innovation, from early projects reshaping deployment to today’s higher-level platforms, has combined technical progress with shifts in how organisations deliver value. Yet too often these movements narrow into tool-centric quick fixes.
Platform engineering sits at these crossroads. On one side it risks becoming another hype cycle, but on the other it offers a way out of today’s fragmented, unsustainable reality.
This keynote explores how decades of platform experience paired with the Linux Foundation and CNCF are guiding this evolution through community groups, white papers, and foundational technologies. It will challenge us to see platform engineering not as another operational trend, but as a higher-level abstraction, one that highlights organisational patterns, tackles interoperability, and informs architectural choices to ensure platforms deliver lasting value.

Speaker: Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer @ Syntasso
Abby is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso delivering Kratix, an open-source cloud-native framework for building internal platforms on Kubernetes. Her keen interest in supporting internal development comes from over a decade of experience in consulting and product delivery roles across platform, site reliability, and quality engineering.
Abby is co-lead of the CNCF Platforms Working Group, a Team Topologies Advocate, and co-host of the #CoffeeOps London meetup.

• 8.30pm onwards - drinks and networking.

So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there.
The LOPUG team.

• Food and drinks provided
• Good time will be had by all

For our January meetup, we're back at the fabulous Accurx offices. We are lining up speakers, the agenda will be:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking
• 7:00pm - Welcome & Housekeeping
• 7:15pm - Talk 1: TBC

Speaker: TBC

• 7.45pm - food, more drinks & networking
• 8.00pm - Talk 2: "TBC"

Speaker: TBC

• 8.30pm onwards - drinks and networking.

So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there.
The LOPUG team.

• Food and drinks provided
• Good time will be had by all