London Platform User Group (LOPUG), Wednesday 18th September, 6.30pm onwards

The summer might be over (if we even had one!) but never fear, we've got an amazing line-up for our September meetup! We're back at the OpenCredo offices in Southwark and the agenda is:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, food, networking
• 7:00pm - Talk 1: Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative

Kubernetes (K8s) tends to be one of the first tools reached for when building platforms and supporting platform engineering initiatives. But success relies on much more than just making K8s easier for developers to consume. Working out how to balance people, process, policy, and technology within a unique organisational context is key to uncovering a feasible and sustainable path forward.

Nicki’s talk explores how the CNCF platform maturity model can be used as part of a toolbox to help guide organisations through such journeys. We begin by identifying a few common scenarios organisations find themselves starting in, and map this onto the model. Then, leveraging our experience of having partnered with different organisations on their Platform Engineering journeys, we plot out a few paths and options which can help organisations practically move towards achieving desired business outcomes.

Speaker: Nicki Watt, Chief Technical Officer, CEO & Company Director @OpenCredo
Nicki is a pragmatic hands on software consultancy with specialisms in data engineering, ML & cloud native solutions. Her career has seen her wear many hats from Engineer, Systems & Technical Architects to Consultant and now CTO and CEO. She is a techie at heart, with involvement leading and now overseeing the successful development and delivery of large scale platform and application development projects for OpenCredo.

• 7.30pm - more drinks & networking
• 7.45pm - Talk 2: Platforms riding the wave of changing organisations

You’ve decided it’s time to kickstart your platform initiative - time to bring that value to your organisation! Maybe you’ve designed your platform for your current team structure and your current business goals. But organisations don’t stay still - maybe your team size will double, business priorities will shift, or your budget will change.

How can you react to a changing organisation and how might this impact your platform? In this talk I’ll share some of my experiences from introducing and evolving platforms at different organisations. We’ll go through a few scenarios of organisational change and what this might mean for a platform journey.

Speaker: Ettie Eyre, Lead Site Reliability Engineer @ Lloyds Banking Group
Ettie has worked from startups to scale-ups to enterprise on platform projects supporting teams working on machine learning to data to application development. She works at Lloyds Banking Group as a Lead Site Reliability Engineer.

• 8.15pm 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