April Event

SAVE THE DATE! - April 6th 2025, 7:00 pm -8:40 pm

AGENDA

7:00 pm - Welcome and House Keeping

Speaker 1 - Swapna Alladi | Head Of Platforms

Swapna Alladi is a Head of Platforms with extensive experience leading large-scale digital transformation and platform engineering initiatives. She specialises in shaping modern platform strategies, implementing best-in-class Azure DevOps and cloud practices, and enabling high-performing engineering teams across organisations.

A recognised thought leader and accomplished public speaker, Swapna regularly presents at internal and external events on platform engineering, DevOps, Azure, and diversity in technology. Her impact in the industry has earned her the *“Engineer of the Year”* award at the WIT Excellence Awards.
A passionate advocate for women in STEM, Swapna serves as a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador, UN Women UK Delegate, and STEM Ambassador, where she actively works to inspire and empower women pursuing careers in technology.

In her role as Head of Platforms, and previously as Principal Azure DevOps Consultant at Version 1, Swapna has driven significant advancements in automation, reliability, and operational efficiency for clients, delivering measurable improvements to engineering velocity and cloud maturity.

Her contributions have also been recognised through finalist positions in the DevOps Excellence Awards and the MK STEM Awards, and her STEM journey has been highlighted in Version 1’s internal news. Swapna continues to shape the future of platform engineering while championing diversity and inclusion across the tech industry.

Session - Navigating DevOps Vs SRE using Azure

In this session, Swapna will explore the key differences and similarities between DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, shedding light on the practical implications of DevOps transformations. Swapna will walk attendees through essential tools, metrics, and strategies that can help organisations decide which approach—or combination of approaches—will be most effective for their unique needs.

The session will also feature a live demo showcasing Azure DevOps tools in action. Swapna will demonstrate continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipelines, highlighting the automation of builds, tests, and releases. She will also dive into SRE practices, utilising Azure Monitor and Application Insights to track system performance, set up alerts, and ensure the reliability of services.

By the end of this talk, attendees will have a better understanding of how to implement DevOps and SRE practices, and how they can apply them to their own organisational context.
The same topic was presented at the Microsoft Reactor office during an SRE meetup and received great feedback. https://www.meetup.com/london-sre-group/events/292702810

Speaker 2 - Björn Sundling | DevOps consultant by day, Rockstar by night.

With a background in ops, Björn got stuck in the DevOps movement a long time ago. Working alongside both dev and ops gave him a good view in to all sides of the company, and today he spends his days helping with everything from communication, through infra as code, to CI/CD pipelines.

By night he Maintains a number of PowerShell modules at [https://GitHub.com/bjompen](https://github.com/bjompen), Writes blog posts at https://bjompen.com, Builds pipelines in Azure DevOps and GitHub, Tries to figure out how Azure works, solders and repairs old tech, and dreams of playing in a Norwegian black metal band.

Session - The easy road from code to node!

Some people write code, and some people look at Azure infrastructure. But what about what's between the two?

In this session we will look at the road from code to deploy: versioning and Pipelines!
How can I know our build works as expected?
Do we know it follows our standards?
Where do we start?
Using Azure DevOps we will set up a workflow to automatically build, test, and deploy your artefacts to the cloud.