What we’re about
Hi tech lovers!
One thing we’re passionate about in Ocado Technology is our engineering culture. Part of that culture are our internal tech talks, where we share knowledge about technology and best practices from around the company. By starting this community, we’d like to go wider - and engage all of you in the debate.
You can find and watch great content from previous meetups in our YouTube library.
With a healthy blend of technical and pragmatic talks, we aim to cover a broad range of topics such as:
- data
- security
- working with the Cloud
- staying on the bleeding edge
- application architecture
- automation
- testing
- feature discovery
- knowledge sharing
- DevOps
- leadership
- and more.
All of this at the scale of hundreds of teams, thousands of developers... and tons of ideas.
Whether you're a software engineer, test engineer, data person, DevOps, team leader or manager, our doors are open to you. Expect talks from Ocado Technology employees and invited guests about tools and practices that span different stacks and industries (drinks & snacks are included too). Let's meet, discuss and synergise our ideas to make the best of the best practices for our company and yours!
Where?
We run our meetups in person, at our Ocado Technology office, located in High5ive Building 4 (Pawia 21). We have a great event space on our 4th floor, come and see for yourself.
Upcoming events (1)
See all- #13 techBytes: Cutting cloud costs - without cutting yourself on the wayPawia 21, Kraków
[in-person event]
Please sign up on our registration list
(this greatly helps us with organizing the space and catering)Hello folks,
We’re excited to invite you to our next techBytes meetup @Ocado Technology.For this edition, we’re piloting a new format. We’ll have one in‑depth topic - Cloud cost optimisation / Technical FinOps on AWS - split into three blocks, each followed by a short break.
During the session, our engineering cloud team - Kasia, Romek, Maciek and Maciek - will share the practical techniques and trade‑offs that have measurably lowered our AWS spend while preserving performance and resiliency at scale.
***Agenda***
18:00 - Grab a drink and take a seat
18:05 - Intro
18:10 - 19:40 (with 2 breaks in between)
Speakers: Katarzyna Myrek, Roman Subik, Maciej Mencner, Maciej Józefczyk - Engineering cloud team.
Topic: Cutting cloud costs - without cutting yourself on the wayAbstract:
Managing cloud costs becomes increasingly challenging as systems grow in scale and complexity.Based on our experience operating large-scale workloads on AWS, we'll share engineering insights that helped us achieve substantial cost savings across compute, networking, and observability layers - without compromising performance or resilience.
Our goal is to equip you with real, actionable patterns for engineering cloud savings, based on real lessons from scaling infrastructure at Ocado Technology.
——
The session will cover how tools like custom FinOps dashboards, thoughtful architecture decisions, and developer-driven cost awareness can directly influence runtime expenses.We'll explore trade-offs around services such as CloudFront, NAT Gateway, ECS (both in cloud and at the Edge), API Gateway configurations, and Load Balancers - showing not just what worked, but why.
Additionally, we’ll cover how runtime choices, including EC2 vs. Fargate, instance types, spot instance strategies, and the use of IoT Greengrass for on-premises devices, can drive meaningful savings. Finally, we’ll address observability costs, highlighting lessons learned in managing metrics, logs, and backups efficiently.
Key event details:
- Date: Wednesday, June 4th, starting at 18:00 (6:00 P.M.). Please arrive a bit earlier to grab your seat (around 5:50 P.M.)
- Location: Ocado office, Pawia 21 Street, next to the Main Train Station. Find us on Google Maps.
- Venue: Dedicated event space, 4th floor.
