London Platform User Group (LOPUG), Thursday 20th March, 6.30pm onwards

For our March meetup, we're back at the fabulous Atomico offices. We have two fantastic talks lined up:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking
• 7:00pm - Talk 1: Building a 5* Kubernetes Hotel

When Fidelity International's public cloud journey began to slow it became clear that the barrier to cloud was too high and with lower cognitive load platforms readily available on premises (CloudFoundry) why would anyone move? This sparked the realisation that they needed to build a public cloud container hosting platform that could provide the experience developers had become used to for so many years: what was born was known as the "Kubernetes Hotel".
Abstracting much of the K8s infrastructure complexity from the internal developers it allowed them to focus on the business logic and leaving the platform team to do the heavy engineering. In this talk Rachael and Dean will explore the high's and low's of the K8s hotel business, how the MVP was more of a motel and what they believe a 5* K8s hotel might look like as they progress further on their journey.

Speakers: Rachael Wonnacott, Associate Director, Container Platform Engineering and Dean Fuller, Director of Developer Platform Engineering @ Fidelity International
Rachael has spent the last decade focused on platform engineering. She places a conscious emphasis on improving flow and is on the quest to smooth the application lifecycle for developers in the enterprise. With a background in astrophysics, Rachael brings her scientific approach into industry as an advocate for open-source and peer-review. She is committed to creating communities with the same ethos; championing transparency to create a safe space for open learning exchanges.

Dean Fuller has spent the last 20 years working in the technology infrastructure domain, always looking for opportunities to challenge approach and focusing on value and quality of the outcomes. Today Dean oversees the Developer Platform Engineering group at Fidelity International that underpin the services we provide to our 14,000 employees and 2.8 million customers.

• 7.30pm - food, more drinks & networking
• 7.45pm - Talk 2: Platform Engineering and DevEx for Your On-Prem LLM

Your CEO wants AI and they want it now BUT you can’t just hand over all your confidential data to a Cloud or SaaS provider. Your CISO is losing sleep. What options do you have to keep your CEO, your developers and security happy? Hannah and Luke will tell the story of how they set up an internal development platform (IDP) around a self-hosted LLM on Kubernetes. From the outset the goal was to use Platform Engineering practices, so engineers could benefit from "paved paths" for:
- Knowledge integrations (commonly known as RAG)
- API integrations to connect the LLM to business applications
- Quality assurance tooling such as the LLM-as-a-judge pattern
This will be a live demo of how to stand up an entire IDP for GenAI apps that the audience can replicate using open source tools. During the demo they will share the lessons learned along the way and present the solution used in production today.
Happy CEO? Yes. Happy CISO? Yes. Happy Developers? Hell Yes!

Speakers: Hannah Foxwell, Independent Consultant @ Kortensia and Luke Marsden, CEO @ HelixML
With over a decade of experience in technology transformation Hannah has always advocated for the human impact of change. Hannah now works as an independent adviser and consultant at the intersection of Platform Engineering, Security and AI. As founder of AI for the rest of us, Hannah is creating essential and accessible learning experiences for everyone to learn about AI, no matter who you are, no matter what your role.

Luke Marsden is a technical leader and startup founder who participated in the early development of Docker and Kubernetes. He is the former SIG lead for SIG-cluster-lifecycle.

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