Yorkshire DevOps #32 - November 2025 - Accenture - Leeds

Accenture will host Yorkshire DevOps at their November 2025 event in the Leeds office.

You can find our code of conduct over at yorkshiredevops.dev

Speakers:
Speaker - Alam Ahmed - Managed Services Support Analyst, Lloyds Boxxe
Talk - Defending the Cloud-Native Frontier: Security as Code with Terraform & OPA
Description - This talk will explore a practical "Security as Code" approach, demonstrating how to proactively build defense-in-depth into your infrastructure using powerful open-source tools. We will dive into how Terraform serves as the first line of defense, allowing you to define and enforce secure baseline configurations for cloud resources like AWS EKS clusters and S3 buckets directly at the point of creation.
But what about those complex, organizational policies that Terraform can't easily express? This is where Open Policy Agent (OPA) and its dedicated Terraform tool, Conftest, come in. We will see how OPA acts as a powerful guardrail, automatically validating Terraform plans against custom security policies to prevent misconfigurations—such as ensuring all EBS volumes are encrypted or that no security groups are left open to the world—before a single resource is ever provisioned.

Speaker - Ikechukwu Emmanuel Arum - Product and Project Manager, Severn Trent & Founder at Hokfam
Talk: Building with Purpose: Lessons from devops Technology, Innovation, and Product Development
Description: In this talk, Ikechukwu will share insights from his journey building products, leading projects, and fostering partnerships across tech and education. He’ll discuss the challenges of turning ideas into impactful solutions, what it takes to align innovation with real-world needs, and the leadership lessons learned along the way. Attendees will gain practical takeaways on managing products and projects, balancing innovation with strategy, and creating technology that drives meaningful change.

Timings (approx):
17:45 - Arrivals and Networking
18:25 - Welcome and introductions
18:30 -Talk 1
19:00 - Break
19:10 - Talk 2
19:55 - Close
20:15 - Venue closes