LOPUG September meetup, Wednesday 6th September, 6.30pm onwards

For our September meetup, we'll be at a new venue, thanks to Accurx for hosting us.

We have two fantastic speakers lined up, the agenda is:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, food, networking

• 7:00pm - Talk 1: "Serverless & chill: stress-free container hosting"

This may come as a surprise but there are viable alternatives to Kubernetes for hosting and running container workloads. Managed, serverless compute services are one such alternative offered by the larger cloud providers - these intend to enable you to run pretty much any containerised workload without the hassle of provisioning and managing any infrastructure. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, in this talk Steve will explore what these serverless compute services offer, what sort of workloads are most suitable and those that really aren’t. He will also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of this type of container hosting, and provide insights into the impact serverless can have on total cost of container ownership.

By the end of this talk the audience will have a good understanding of serverless compute offerings, how they fit into the container hosting landscape, and have enough information to determine whether they have a place in their container strategy.

Speaker: Steve Judd, Chief Architect @ Jetstack

Steve is an experienced application and cloud native architect with a passion for all things DevOps. He is an experienced Kubernetes wrangler since the ‘early days’ and specialises in providing innovative and pragmatic solutions that enable developer and platform teams to increase their velocity. Current areas of interest include improving the security of software supply chains and the developer experience. When not working Steve is happiest messing about in boats.

• 7.30pm - more drinks & networking

• 7.45pm - Talk 2: "Making an impact as a platform product manager"

As Platform Product Managers (PMs), we are responsible for managing a platform product's development, reliability, and evolution. This includes:

• Defining the platform vision and strategy in line with the company objectives.

• Collaborating with internal partners (I call developers partners, instead of customers or users) to build a seamless developer experience.

• Optimising for developer productivity (there is an element of cost optimisation here as well).

• Managing technical risk.

• Communicating effectively and abstracting all the technical jargon.

These are big topics which can be tackled individually but as Platform PMs we need to master the basics of these well.

Speaker: Alexandra Craciun, Senior Product Manager, Platforms @ Zoa

Alexandra is Senior Product Manager, focused on empowering engineering teams through internal platforms. Currently working as a full time Product Manager and part-time researching the use of Behavioral Economics in building technology products.

• 8.15pm onwards - drinks, nibbles 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