Yorkshire DevOps x Yorkshire Azure: MLOps at scale and security cornerstones.

Yorkshire DevOps and the Yorkshire Azure User Group are joining forces for our October 2026 event, hosted by Enablis at their Leeds office.

You can find our code of conduct at: https://yorkshiredevops.dev/

Talk title: From ad hoc to automated: scaling reliable MLOps deployments on Vertex AI
Speakers: Claire Guiraud, Machine Learning Engineer, and Furio De Nardis, Lead Data Engineer at Morrisons
Abstract:
Machine learning at scale usually starts with fragmented, ad hoc processes that miss operational KPIs and lean heavily on engineering teams. Claire and Furio share their real journey building a standardised MLOps framework on GCP, and it wasn't a smooth ride: a failed reference implementation forced them to start again from scratch.
They'll walk through the pivot to a config-driven, pluggable architecture built on Kubeflow Pipelines and SK-ops on Vertex AI, and how they balanced convention over configuration to get consistency and reliability.

You'll come away understanding why an MLOps framework matters, the real challenges of building your own, the components a robust pipeline needs, and the design patterns and technology choices they made along the way.

About Claire:
Claire is a Machine Learning Engineer with an unusually broad background, spanning linguistic research engineering, data science and clinical communication.

About Furio:
Furio is Lead Data Engineer at Morrisons, with over 30 years in the IT industry across telecommunications, media, logistics and retail. His focus is on engineering maturity and coaching teams to get there.

Talk title: Cornerstones of securing a modern environment
Speaker: Liam O'Donnell, IT Technical Support Lead at Dec Group (UK)
Abstract:
Liam covers the high-level fundamentals of securing a Windows environment, from endpoint security and asset management to MFA: the building blocks everything else depends on.

About Liam:
Liam is IT Technical Support Lead and Cyber Security Lead at Dec Group (UK) in Huddersfield, where he looks after infrastructure, Microsoft 365, endpoint management, identity, security architecture, disaster recovery and the delivery of technical projects across the business.
He has over 10 years in enterprise IT, with a technical background covering Microsoft Exchange, Google Workspace, DNS, Windows internals, identity and access management, disaster recovery and cybersecurity. He's worked across industrial and aerospace IT, corporate office infrastructure, and managed service providers large and small, including one supporting more than 13,000 customers.

On the night
17:45 Arrivals and networking
18:25 Welcome and introductions
18:30 Claire Guiraud and Furio De Nardis
19:00 Break
19:10 Liam O'Donnell
19:45 Close

Coming up: DevOps & Platform Leaders Summit
20 October 2026, at Accenture in Leeds, five minutes from Leeds City Station. A single-track day for platform, DevOps and engineering leaders, with practitioner-led, vendor-neutral talks on internal developer platforms, delivery models, AI in engineering and running production at scale.
Speakers include Sam Cunliffe (Howden Insurance), Kate Gawron (DoiT), Ian Watson (ArisGlobal) and Keith Moyo (NHS), with Andy Shepherd (Microsoft), closing with a recruitment panel on building teams where women thrive. Find more here: https://www.communitystack.io/conferences/devops-platform-leaders

Thank you to Enablis for hosting, and to Ada Meher and Digital Endeavours for their ongoing support of Yorkshire DevOps. To speak, sponsor or host, please email ethan.sumner@communitystack.io