Cloud Native London

Hi folks!

Welcome to our December Cloud Native London meetup! Join us to hear from our three great speakers and network with your fellow techies over pizza and drinks, or alternatively chat and following along on Youtube!

6:00 Pizza and drinks
6:30 Welcome
6:45 Decoupling from the Hyperscalers: A Kubernetes-Based Sovereign AI & Compute Platform (Dr Jeremy Murray, stack8s)
7:15 From Chaos to Confidence: How I Learned to Love - And Laugh in the Face Of - Chaos (Rob Reid, Cockroach Labs)
7:45 Break
8:00 Checking Out of Hotel California: The Case for Spark on Kubernetes (Radu Sora, Polysemantic)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Decoupling from the Hyperscalers: A Kubernetes-Based Sovereign AI & Compute Platform (Dr Jeremy Murray, stack8s)
As AI and compute workloads grow, organizations are seeking greater control, security, and independence from hyperscaler cloud providers. This talk explores how we built a Sovereign AI & Compute Platform entirely on Kubernetes, designed to operate across diverse environments without vendor lock-in. We’ll dive into the architectural principles, open source components, and operational patterns that enable scalable, cloud-agnostic compute - from infrastructure orchestration to AI workload management. Attendees will learn how Kubernetes can serve as the foundation for a sovereign, portable, and resilient cloud-native ecosystem.
Built on this foundation, stack8s integrates with 15+ cloud providers and 700 data centers, allowing customers to keep their data where it is. We bring compute closer to compliant data through encryption, low-latency connectivity, and a true hybrid/multi-cloud experience. No more infrastructure headaches. No more vendor lock-in. Own your compute end to end.

Find him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremymurray/

From Chaos to Confidence: How I Learned to Love - And Laugh in the Face Of - Chaos (Rob Reid, Cockroach Labs)
The best way to handle disaster is to make it boring. Whether you're running a startup or managing enterprise infrastructure, Murphy's Law will eventually rear its ugly head. The larger the scale, the higher the frequency and the uglier the head. In this talk, Rob will walk you through real scenarios where machines crash, networks partition, disks fail, and regions go dark, yet applications keep running without missing a beat.
Through the horrifying medium of live demos, we’ll explore the impact of common failure types and how you too can laugh in the face of disaster.

Rob Reid is Cockroach Labs’ Technical Evangelist and a software developer from London. In his career, he has written backend, frontend, and messaging software for the police, travel, finance, commodities, sports betting, telecoms, retail, and aerospace industries. He is the author of “CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly), “Practical CockroachDB: Building Fault-Tolerant Distributed SQL Databases” (Apress) and “Understanding Multi-Region Application Architecture” (O’Reilly) and has two CockroachDB tattoos.

Checking Out of Hotel California: The Case for Spark on Kubernetes (Radu Sora, Polysemantic)
Databricks was the 5-star hotel we all needed. After surviving the fun of the Hadoop ecosystem, it was magic: a world where infrastructure just... worked. We checked in, got comfortable, and started solving problems.
Fast forward to today, and many of us are still in the hotel. The problem is that the bill has arrived and it's 7-figures. We're paying hefty premium for what has become, essentially, a proprietary infrastructure orchestrator. We're trapped in the ""Hotel California"" by convenience, proprietary runtimes, and governance layers we were told we couldn't live without. This talk is the escape plan. We will challenge the core myth: that running Spark on your own is ""too complex."" We'll argue that for any organization operating at scale, the open source stack (Spark on K8s) is no longer just a cheaper alternative, but a superior one.
Join this session to:
- Deconstruct the bill: We'll pit the real cost of EKS & Spark on Kubernetes against the Databricks DBU's, demonstrating how you're overpaying;
- Deploy the alternative: See a battle-tested, open-source architecture using EKS, Karpenter, Argo Workflows, and Grafana that you can deploy in hours;
- Reclaim your culture: Discover the most important benefit - how moving away from a black box ""just works"" platform fosters a more inquisitive, cost-aware, and effective engineering team.
It's time to check out.

Radu Sora is a technology leader with over two decades of experience across the UK, Silicon Valley, and the Nordics. With a PhD in engineering and a career spanning media analytics, low-latency trading, ad-tech, financial services, and healthcare, he’s built and led teams that operate where deep tech meets hard business realities.
Known for challenging comfortable assumptions, he prefers hands-on work, radically transparent leadership, and cutting through technological mythology (especially the kind where marketing trumps engineering). He thrives in ambiguity, has little patience for black-box convenience, and believes that genuine innovation requires curiosity, dissent, and a refusal to accept “that’s just how it’s done.” Find him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/radusora/

Check out https://www.oicheryl.com/cloudnativelondon if you're interested in speaking or sponsoring.

Hi folks!

Welcome to our January Cloud Native London meetup, our first of 2026! Join us to hear from our three great speakers and network with your fellow techies over pizza and drinks, or alternatively chat and following along on Youtube!

6:00 Pizza and drinks
6:30 Welcome
6:45 Flagsmith Speaker TBC
7:15 Testkube Speaker TBC
7:45 Break
8:00 Aerospike Speaker TBC
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Check out https://www.oicheryl.com/cloudnativelondon if you're interested in speaking or sponsoring.

Hi folks!

Welcome to our February Cloud Native London meetup! Join us to hear from our three great speakers and network with your fellow techies over pizza and drinks, or alternatively chat and following along on Youtube!

6:00 Pizza and drinks
6:30 Welcome
6:45 SUSE Speaker TBC
7:15 Prithvi Raj, Mirantis (Talk TBC)
7:45 Break
8:00 Akshya Prakkash, Urban Care Community (Talk TBC)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Check out https://www.oicheryl.com/cloudnativelondon if you're interested in speaking or sponsoring.