Kubernetes gives us abstraction and power—but with great YAML comes great responsibility. In this talk, we’ll walk through live demos of real-world misconfigurations that allow attackers to escape containers and tamper with the host. You’ll see exactly what happens when Pods run in privileged mode, use hostPath volumes carelessly, or retain excess Linux capabilities. We’ll also show how to detect these attacks in real time using Falco, and enforce safety nets with Pod Security Admission. If you’ve ever wondered "what’s the worst that could happen?"—this session answers that with receipts.

As a DevOps Engineer, I aim to enable developers and businesses to focus on their core competencies by tackling infrastructure challenges. Automation is fundamental to solve these challenges so, technologies such as Docker, Terraform, and Kubernetes are strong skills of mine. Also, I hold AWS Solutions Architect Professional, AWS DevOps Professional, GCP DevOps professional, Terraform Associate certifications.

I have held several senior positions in infrastructure, application support, and cloud computing - AWS and GCP - delivery in both startups and large corporations. This journey took me to live and work in 3 different countries: Brazil, Costa Rica, and Portugal, providing me constructive cultural exposure.

I firmly believe that education is crucial for our development. I have a bachelor's degree from FIAP (Brazil) and a Master's in Business Administration (MBA) from Hult International Business School (UK).

DevOps, it turns out, is not dead. This is awkward for everyone who has already written the eulogy, ordered the wreaths, and booked the conference slot titled "What Comes After DevOps.”

In fact, DevOps was never the thing at all, but rather the deeply misunderstood journey towards the thing — a long, occasionally slippery climb in which humans attempted to persuade software systems to deliver value without requiring nightly sacrifices, heroic memory feats, or a particularly knowledgeable individual often, spookily, named Dave.

Platforms, far from being a fashionable replacement, were somewhat always the destination: carefully constructed habitats designed to prevent developers from having to hold the entire universe in their heads at once, allowing value to flow calmly from idea to production without screaming. Just like DevOps.

Along the way, we made the classic mistake of becoming certain. Certain that more tools meant more progress. Certain that optimisation was the same as improvement. Certain that if everything was faster, the system must be better — even when the bottleneck remained stubbornly unmoved, quietly sipping tea and watching us optimise everything else.

In this talk Russ Miles, Internal Developer Platforms at ClearBank, explains the relationship between the Princess Bride and his DevOps journey, gently dismantling the illusion of certainty, borrowing from constraint theory, cognitive science, and the occasional sword fight to argue that nothing dies faster than an idea trapped in false certainty. DevOps lives precisely where curiosity survives, platforms succeed only when they remain evidenced, and the true purpose of all this effort is revealed to be astonishingly simple: to let value flow, humans think, and systems remain just boring enough not to notice — which, as it turns out, is rather the point.

Russell Miles is a technical product owner at ClearBank, focused on building internal developer platforms. He is also a long-time author with O’Reilly Media, with eight books published and another in progress, and brings a background spanning engineering leadership, product, and software architecture. Based in Eastbourne, England, he combines hands-on technical work with teaching, writing, and community service.

How many times were you woken up during the night to either spend more time than you would like trying to figure out what exactly broke, or get frustrated once you figured out it was actually a false positive? Well, with Agents, this won't happen, and your organization will get better by using them.

Daniel Afonso is a Senior Developer Advocate at PagerDuty, SolidJS DX team member, Instructor at Egghead.io, and Author of State Management with React Query. Daniel has a full-stack background, having worked with different languages and frameworks on various projects from IoT to Fraud Detection. He is passionate about learning and teaching and has spoken at multiple conferences around the world about topics he loves. In his free time, when he's not learning new technologies or writing about them, he's probably reading comics or watching superhero movies and shows.

Saturation is often measured indirectly, by CPU or queue depth, and not by capacity. Extending Envoy with eBPF tracks live concurrent requests against true limits, giving us direct visibility into "fullness." This cuts MTTR and eliminates the wasteful safety margins indirect metrics force us to use.

An early contributor to the Envoy proxy project, now working on developing tools to detect and mitigate inefficiencies in the way services interact with each other. Over the years Tal has been a founding engineer and a contractor working on a wide variety of cloud-native data-plane projects, including data protection and replication, API gateways, and security products.

The next evolution of incident response isn’t faster alerts, it’s autonomous resolution. Join ilert CEO Birol Yildiz as he shows how AI SRE agents now diagnose and remediate outages without waking anyone up. Learn how these systems combine observability data, deployment context, and code intelligence to restore services in minutes and hand over clean incident reports instead of 3 a.m. pages.

Birol Yildiz is the Co-founder and CEO of ilert, adeptly steering the company with a rare combination of technical and product expertise. His prior experience includes a significant role as Chief Product Owner for Big Data products at REWE Digital. With a strong foundation in computer science, Birol bridges the gap between developer and product strategist, constantly striving to innovate and provide customer-centric solutions at ilert.

So many know the drill - a centre of excellence is stood up, some code and recommendations come out of it, nobody really uses it, back to the usual in a year or so. It happens very often in large enterprises trying to reinvent the engineering function

With this session though I am not here to complain or talk about failed attempts - I want to talk about an actual success story which absorbed over a year of my life (and it's still ongoing!), which led to a well-oiled Inner Source product in a large enterprise as well as a number of examples of collaborative development in a non-IT organisation.

It's been a journey, long and with mistakes, however successful in the end! Let's see how.

Matteo Emili is Director and Head of Software Engineering for Accenture Microsoft Business Group UKIA, leading teams at the intersection of modern engineering, DevOps, and AI. A Microsoft MVP, he focuses on practical, real world solutions and active community knowledge sharing.

The engineer gets a ticket: "Production is down." They fix it and move on. The DevOps engineer gets the same ticket and asks: "How do we stop this happening again?" They build alerting, write runbooks, and automate the recovery. The platform engineer never sees the ticket. They designed a self-healing pattern six months ago that made the failure mode impossible. This isn't a story about DevOps dying - it's about DevOps growing up. Through the lens of a typical day's work, we'll trace the evolution from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention to strategic design. Drawing on experience leading platform engineering at a fintech running multi-cloud infrastructure, we'll explore what actually changes as organisations mature: not the tools, but the questions we ask and where we invest our time. You'll leave with a framework for recognising where your team sits on this journey, and practical steps to shift from fixing problems to designing them out of existence.

Rui is a Lead Platform Engineer at IG Group, where he leads a distributed platform engineering team across the UK , India and Poland. He works across AWS and GCP but is specialised in GCP. He spends his days building self-service infrastructure, and trying to mass-produce the kind of calm mornings that only come from good platform design.

I spent years taking on development teams and transforming them into high performers and the team members were never the problem. This session leans on years of "transformations" and a decade of research to provide some concrete steps you can take to do the same. The DORA research reveals what elite performers do differently, but knowing what to improve and actually making improvements are different challenges. This session cuts through the complexity to focus on the handful of high-impact capabilities you can start using today. You'll learn where to start for the biggest returns, how to sequence your efforts, and how to build momentum toward elite performance levels without trying to transform everything at once.

Steve Fenton researches the socio-technical systems behind software delivery; how organizations, people, and technology actually work together (or don’t). At Octopus Deploy, he explores GitOps, Platform Engineering, Continuous Delivery, and compliance through a lens shaped by punk history, psychology, and the kind of genre fiction that asks uncomfortable questions about systems and society.

He’s an eight-time Microsoft MVP (DevOps), a DORA Community Guide, and a member of the CNCF Platform Engineering Community Group. He’s written books on TypeScript, Octopus Deploy, and Web Operations Monitoring, and occasionally writes horror fiction that reveals truths about how things actually work.

A self-described Software Punk, pragmatist-abstractionist, and generalising-generalist, Steve studied Psychology at OSC and the history of punk (1976-1978) at the University of Reading. Those aren’t side interests; they’re how he thinks.

The Problem

You would never allow senior engineers to outsource core code decisions to unvetted offshore vendors without contracts or accountability.

Yet many teams deploy AI generated code with zero guardrails: - No visibility into reasoning - No clarity in review - No cognitive engagement required from the engineer

Risks to the Individual Engineer

MIT research from 2025 shows that developers who rely on AI assistance exhibit persistent cognitive decline even after they stop using it. Recovery requires effort comparable to stroke rehabilitation.

Key risks include: - Permanent debugging skill loss due to cognitive offloading - Architectural judgment decay, especially in junior engineers who never implement full features - Unrecoverable cognitive cost, where re skilling requires months of deliberate practice

Risks to the Engineering Department

The disruption of the junior to senior pipeline is structural. If AI prevents junior engineers from building foundational skills, organizations face a hiring and capability crisis within three to five years.

Department level risks include: - Collapse of the junior to senior pipeline, leaving no internal talent for architects, on call rotations, or technical leadership - Production reliability failures as on call teams lose the ability to debug or reason through incidents - An uncontrollable blast radius from AI driven decisions that cannot be verified or explained

Joe Woodhouse is a principal engineer and board-level adviser with over two decades of experience spanning low latency trading systems, large scale financial platforms, and technical leadership at the most senior levels. He has worked across global banks and financial institutions as a staff and principal engineer, combining deep hands on systems expertise with strategy, governance, and risk management. Joe is also a non executive director, bringing an engineer’s rigor to board decision making, particularly around technology, AI, and operational resilience. Based in London, he is known for bridging the gap between server room realities and boardroom accountability.

Upgrading is not a strategy, it is an action. One that often increases risk in complex, long-lived systems. This session challenges the illusion of control created by scanners, checklists, and “just upgrade” thinking. End-of-life software is an operational constraint to be managed with engineering judgment, not a ritual to be performed.

Accomplished technical leader and developer advocate with over three decades of experience in software engineering, LJC Community Director, DevOps, developer advocacy, and security, especially cybercrime and software supply chains. Recognized international public speaker and author on software supply chain security, AI, and cybercrime legislation, with a deep background in engineering and DevOps leadership

Years before ChatGPT, M&S has adopted Artificial Intelligence for Retail Stores and Customer Services as part of the enterprise digital transformation programme. The solution runs on a custom-build, multi-cloud platform fondly called ‘Ava’. Its success exceeded expectations on all counts: customer engagement and satisfaction as well as operational efficiency. The presentation gives insights into what makes Ava and its ecosystem special: the people, the processes and the tools.

Technologist with extensive experience across industries. Bogdan has led specialist teams in implementing automation through AI at scale, delivering and operating enterprise platforms worldwide with high ROI and fast benefit realisation. Speaker at global conferences on AI, data privacy, counter-intelligence and security. Background in electronics and telecommunication engineering.

We run PgBouncer on Kubernetes at Fresha as the “gatekeeper” in front of Postgres, and it became one of those components that’s essential, though it started rough initially.

This is a practical war story about operating PgBouncer at scale on K8s: what broke, what surprised us, and what we had to adapt to make it reliable in production. I’ll cover the real operational challenges(surviving pod evictions, rollouts, config rollouts) and how we hardened the system.

The second half is about upgrades: how we used PgBouncer to execute Postgres version upgrades with effectively zero downtime, what “zero downtime” actually meant in practice with PgBouncer specifically and what tricks we needed to invent for this.

Anton Borisov is a Principal Data Architect at Fresha (London), working on high-scale data and database infrastructure across Postgres and real-time systems. He spends an unhealthy amount of time turning “this should be fun” components into production-grade systems. He speaks and writes about data, streaming, and modern infrastructure, and in his spare time he also deploys dahlias into pots in his garden.

This session explores a real-world AWS OpenSearch case study, highlighting the technical and operational trade-offs between serverless and provisioned architectures. I will discuss the specific challenges we faced with Serverless and why it did not meet our requirements.

I am a Senior Software Engineer at Trainline, where I focus on architecting and scaling high-performance backend systems. My path to backend engineering was non-traditional; starting in Game Development and studying Physics, I developed a deep appreciation for performance, concurrency, and complex simulations.

Driving a change to new technology and new processes starts with energising and inspiring your stakeholders to listen and care about your idea. You need to be able to adapt that message for different people. Persuading a wizard is very different to persuading a barbarian.

In this session we'll cover how to build relevant, compelling and emotionally engaging content that sparks action from your message. Learn how to make the complex simple, influence stakeholders and lead the charge for change in the DevOps world.

Ben Pearce makes people in the tech sector more influential, memorable and successful. He spent 20 years at Microsoft, 10 years as an infrastructure and automation consultant and 10 years in leadership. He led high performing teams in in a variety of roles before founding Elevated You. Now he develops the humans skills of people in the tech world through training, events and the Tech World Human Skills podcast. When he's not coaching folks, he's either playing his guitar or removing goblins from dungeons.

Matt Schillerstrom is Director of Product Management and Product Marketing at Harness, where he leads strategy and go to market execution across DevOps solutions, including feature flags, chaos engineering, and reliability tooling. He brings deep experience spanning product management, engineering, and community leadership in resilience and chaos engineering.

Dewan Ahmed is a Principal Developer Advocate at Harness and a Governing Board General Member Representative at the Continuous Delivery Foundation. He focuses on DevRel and content strategy across CI/CD, DevOps, and open source, with deep expertise in software supply chain security and developer experience.

This talk explores how agentic AI can be applied to build enterprise-ready CI/CD pipelines that are faster, safer, and easier to operate at scale. Chinmay will walk through how autonomous agents can make decisions across build, test, and deployment workflows, reducing manual intervention while improving reliability and governance. Attendees will gain a practical view of how AI-driven automation fits into modern CI/CD platforms and what it takes to move from experimental pipelines to production-grade delivery systems.

Chinmay is the Director of Product Marketing at Harness. He has experience in developer tools, cloud, and data center technologies. Previously, he worked at companies such as Intel, IBM, and early-stage startups, focusing on application security, observability, and Kubernetes. In his free time, he loves traveling and exploring new restaurants.

Site Reliability Engineering was never meant to be about firefighting, yet too many teams find themselves stuck in an endless cycle of pages, postmortems, and quick fixes. Why? Because SRE is full of hidden traps — patterns that look like best practices on the surface but slowly erode reliability, burn out engineers, and stall progress.

In this talk, we’ll expose the 7 Deadly Traps of SRE, from the obsession with chasing “five nines,” to the cult of on-call heroism, to the false comfort of tooling and checklists. For each trap, we’ll unpack why it’s so seductive, how it quietly sabotages your team, and what to do instead.

You’ll walk away with a clearer lens on the pitfalls holding SRE organizations back, and a practical playbook to help your team escape firefighting mode and reclaim the true purpose of SRE: building systems - and cultures - that are resilient, scalable, and human-friendly.

Miko Pawlikowski is an SRE Author and a platform engineer at Quadrature. He has led large-scale infrastructure and SRE initiatives at Citadel and Bloomberg, with deep expertise in Kubernetes, cloud computing, and chaos engineering. Passionate about building resilient systems and communities, he brings together engineers worldwide through conferences and media projects.