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.... Read more
The fastest way to break trust in DevSecOps is to automate insecurity at scale. As AI takes a central role in our pipelines, it is time to rethink what "secure by default" really means.
In this keynote, Dewan Ahmed will challenge the audience to look beyond vulnerability scanners and compliance gates. He will share a vision for intelligent security by design, where native intelligence within the delivery platform detects not only vulnerable code but risky delivery behavior such as misconfigured environments, suspicious artifact provenance, and drift between source and runtime.
You will walk away with a framework for balancing automation with human oversight and examples from Harness’ work on building verifiable, auditable, AI-native delivery systems. In the new world of DevSecOps, safety is not a step; it is an outcome we continuously learn to improve.... Read more
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.... Read more
This workshop will teach attendees the basics of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in a fun gamified way that combines learning DevOps fundamentals with making "line go up". Attendees will gain hands-on expertise with both AWS and HashiCorp Terraform in a free, safe, and sand-boxed environment. Bring your laptop and a web browser (no additional tools are needed to get started) and leave with tips and tricks that you can immediately apply to your own workflows.... Read more
This workshop will teach attendees the basics of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in a fun gamified way that combines learning DevOps fundamentals with making "line go up". Attendees will gain hands-on expertise with both AWS and HashiCorp Terraform in a free, safe, and sand-boxed environment. Bring your laptop and a web browser (no additional tools are needed to get started) and leave with tips and tricks that you can immediately apply to your own workflows.... Read more
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.... Read more
Improving the culture and experience of DevOps teams isn’t about adding more tools or piling on new processes; it’s about creating the conditions where people can thrive. When engineers feel empowered, supported, and trusted, they deliver not just code, but lasting impact for the business. Yet too often, teams get bogged down by friction: unclear ownership, unnecessary bureaucracy, or a lack of shared purpose.
In this talk, we’ll explore practical approaches and best practices for building healthier, more effective DevOps cultures. Drawing from real-world experiences and lessons learned from leading platform, governance, and engineering teams, I’ll share strategies for fostering autonomy without chaos, encouraging collaboration without micromanagement, and aligning technical teams with business outcomes.
You’ll walk away with actionable ideas you can start applying immediately: whether it’s creating internal communities that inspire innovation, building platforms that teams actually want to use, or rethinking leadership habits that might be unintentionally holding people back. The ultimate goal is helping your teams become more empowered, efficient, and impactful while creating an environment where great engineering work can truly flourish... Read more
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.... Read more
What does reliability truly mean when building critical payment infrastructure for the world’s largest banks? In regulated and mission-critical industries like fintech, reliability is not just about technology. It is shaped by culture, collaboration, and everyday ways of working. Organisations powering platforms for multi-billion-dollar enterprises quickly learn that reliability depends on how people work across functions, make decisions under pressure, and learn from failure in highly constrained environments.
This talk goes beyond uptime and SLAs to explore the human and collaborative foundations of reliability. We will examine what practices help prevent incidents before they occur and how teams respond effectively when issues arise. Communication, and the way teams communicate, plays a central role in shaping operational reliability and decision-making in complex, regulated environments. Drawing on real-world experience running critical fintech infrastructure, the session shares practical insights to design culture and ways of working, helping organisations maintain reliability and resilience without slowing innovation.... Read more
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.... Read more
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.... Read more
AI has gotten really good at writing code, but it's also exposed some bottlenecks that were always there, just not at the front of our minds.
In Kubernetes environments especially, code rarely works on the first try. You're dealing with services, APIs, auth, infrastructure that all need to play nicely together. And AI
agents? They still have to wait for CI/CD pipelines just like the rest of us. The bottleneck has quietly shifted from writing code to validating it.
This talk doesn't have slides. Instead, we'll progress through a pixel-art RPG game together, where we’ll try to make our way through bottleneck canyon, exploring two domains where these bottlenecks have become impossible to ignore: open
source security (where maintainers are overwhelmed by low-quality, often AI-generated reports) and the inner developer loop (where faster code generation hasn't made the waiting
any shorter).
By the end of the quest, we'll arrive at a common thread connecting both problems, and I'll demo how tools like mirrord let AI agents test code directly against live Kubernetes
environments, validating and self-correcting without waiting in line.
It's a bit different. Hopefully it's also useful.... Read more
17:00
Wrap up
Scan each other's QR codes & head to a nearby pub!
AI is changing how teams build, test, and ship software—but speed only matters if reliability and security keep up. This talk shares practical ways to combine modern DevOps and platform practices with AI-assisted workflows to accelerate delivery without increasing risk. We’ll look at where AI helps most across the delivery lifecycle, what “guardrails-first” looks like in practice, and how progressive delivery and observability create safer, faster releases. The session is designed to be broadly applicable across industries, toolchains, and team maturity levels.... Read more
#### 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
... Read more
In every great campaign, no single class can conquer the dungeon alone. The modern enterprise is no different. This talk explores how Platform, Data, Security, and Development teams can stop acting like rival guilds and start adventuring as a unified party.... Read more
In a Zero-Trust world, authentication is only step one. The real question is: should this principal be allowed to perform this action on this resource — right now?
This session shows how cloud-native platforms enforce fine-grained authorization with AWS Verified Permissions and the Cedar policy language. We’ll break down what happens after authentication — from token claims and identity context to resource relationships and real-time policy evaluation.
You’ll leave with a practical blueprint to:
Treat authorization as a first-class architecture layer
Move permissions out of application code into auditable policies
Enforce least privilege across microservices and multi-tenant systems
Ensure every API request is explicitly authorized — never implicitly trusted
If you’re building secure systems at scale, authorization becomes the true foundation of Zero Trust.... Read more
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.... Read more
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.... Read more
Modern CI/CD systems are packed with powerful service credentials. These are often more powerful than the engineers who rely on them. In this talk, I will walk through how attackers can exfiltrate “secured” service credentials from CI/CD environments and use them to pivot deeper into cloud platforms.
We’ll explore how these credentials are stored, how pipelines unintentionally expose them, and how quickly an attacker can move from a compromised build job to full cloud exploitation. Expect a mix of real‑world patterns, a hands‑on demo, and practical guidance on how to lock things down before someone else takes them for a spin.... Read more
I got good at infrastructure because it kept getting in the way.
This talk is about what happens when you get tired of watching the same problem repeat. From PLCs with 6 month wait times to founders burning £10 million on backend plumbing instead of building their product. How getting out of the way, and staying invisible, helps everyone move faster. And how that new normal becomes shockingly obvious the moment it breaks.
I'll cover the architectural decisions behind Anythink: tenanted Kubernetes from day one, CI/CD as a product feature rather than internal tooling, and Landscaper, the in-house tool we built to handle tenant lifecycle, feature flagging, JWT and cross-tenant permissions, and act as the glue between Terraform, Kubernetes, and our entire infrastructure. Nothing off the shelf did what we needed, so we built it.
Two real deployments: a sports psychology app and an international music distributor that started on Microsoft Access and is now running on modern cloud infrastructure without even knowing it's doing DevOps.
The goal was always invisible infrastructure. Give developers the control they need, safe defaults, and nothing getting in the way of the product. This is how we got there.
... Read more
Every team says they "do DevOps" - but saying it and living it are very different things. This talk is a real-world case study of walking into a fragmented engineering setup where DevOps was a job title, not a practice, and transforming it into a proper platform engineering function. I'll cover what we actually found on the ground - siloed teams, manual deployments, tribal knowledge, and the classic "it works on my machine" culture - and the practical steps we took to fix it. From consolidating tooling and building golden paths to changing how teams think about ownership, this is the honest, sometimes painful story of what it actually takes to go from DevOps theatre to real engineering excellence. No theory, no utopian architectures - just what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently next time.
Short Bio: Mo Abukar is a Principal Platform/DevOps Engineer, Co-Founder of CoderCo, and a platform engineering consultant who helps startups and scale-ups review their infrastructure, optimise costs, and build scalable platforms. With 7+ years of experience, Mo specialises in cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and internal developer platforms. He's taught DevOps and platform engineering to over 5,000 students worldwide, maintains open-source projects with nearly 1,000 GitHub followers, and regularly shares insights with his 80K+ LinkedIn community. Mo is a CNCF contributor who believes the best infrastructure is the kind developers actually want to use.... Read more
16:30
Wrap up
Scan each other's QR codes & head to a nearby pub!
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.... Read more
Our databases weren't dead, but they weren't healthy either. And I was tired of answering the same questions. "Is this index being used?" "Why is vacuum not running?" "What version of Postgres are we on?" So I built `pgdoctor` - a CLI with opinionated health checks for PostgreSQL. Each check explains _what_ it found and _why_ it matters, but also gives you the exact command to fix it - because most engineers just want to know what to do.
It was a simple tool for a specific problem. But then our CTO picked up the pattern and built repo-doctor - same architecture, different domain. It analyses repositories for good and bad signals: Kubernetes configs, library choices, ownership files, documentation, dev setup. Each service gets a score. We collect those scores into a scoreboard visible to the whole engineering organisation, and suddenly we have a shared language to talk to product about technical health.
The architecture was simple enough to copy, the pattern was clear enough to follow, and frameworks like Bubbletea made building polished terminal interfaces surprisingly fast.... Read more
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.... Read more
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.... Read more
Most DevOps and SRE teams are now “accidental security teams”: they own CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and on-call, but they also inherit security alert storms from tools like Microsoft Defender XDR. In this talk, Nikolay shows how to collapse MTTR by turning thousands of noisy alerts across endpoint, identity, email, and SaaS into a small number of clear, repeatable workflows.
Nikolay will walk through a practical pipeline built on Microsoft-native capabilities:
- Correlation: stitching scattered alerts into incidents that map to real on-call runbooks
- Automation: safe first-mile patterns with Logic Apps that enrich, route, deduplicate, and contain without waking people up at 3am for nothing
- Copilot: using Security Copilot to compress analysis and reporting time with guided summaries, hypothesis-driven questions, and draft KQL you can validate and run
- Measurement: simple metrics and scorecards to prove “we reduced MTTR and noise” to both engineers and leadership... Read more
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.... Read more
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.... Read more
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.... Read more
This talk shares a real-world case study of scaling mobile delivery across 10+ product squads in a large omnichannel organisation.
Delivery bottlenecks led to the transformation of a centrally owned mobile app into a shared platform used by multiple squads. The session highlights the patterns that enabled safe, parallel delivery at scale: CI/CD ownership for mobile, backend-driven UI, feature flags for progressive rollout, and observability that connects releases to real user impact.
Together, these changes supported 3× growth in MAU, while allowing teams to move faster without increasing operational risk as many squads shipped through a single mobile app.... Read more
16:30
Wrap up
Scan each other's QR codes & head to a nearby pub!
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.
Bio
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.
Emma Higashikawa & Sam McGeown
AWS & HashiCorp
1h Workshop: A Casual Introduction To DevOps, But Make It A Contest
Abstract
This workshop will teach attendees the basics of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in a fun gamified way that combines learning DevOps fundamentals with making "line go up". Attendees will gain hands-on expertise with both AWS and HashiCorp Terraform in a free, safe, and sand-boxed environment. Bring your laptop and a web browser (no additional tools are needed to get started) and leave with tips and tricks that you can immediately apply to your own workflows.
Bio
Emma Higashikawa is a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, currently serving as a partner solutions architect for AWS GameDay. With a background in aerospace and satellite solutions, she focuses on cloud architecture, system design, and applied generative AI, helping partners and customers build and operate complex workloads on AWS. Emma began her career as a cloud developer and QA engineer at Amazon, and holds a mechanical engineering degree from Yale University, with additional academic experience in architecture and civil engineering from the University of Tokyo.
Sam McGeown is a senior developer advocate at HashiCorp and a long-time cloud and Kubernetes practitioner based in the UK. He has deep hands-on experience across public and private cloud, Kubernetes, Terraform, APIs, automation, and cloud-native platforms, with a background spanning consulting, product management, and technical marketing. Sam is known for translating complex infrastructure and DevOps concepts into practical guidance through talks, community content, and hands-on demos.
Emma Higashikawa & Sam McGeown
AWS & HashiCorp
1h Workshop: A Casual Introduction To DevOps, But Make It A Contest
Abstract
This workshop will teach attendees the basics of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in a fun gamified way that combines learning DevOps fundamentals with making "line go up". Attendees will gain hands-on expertise with both AWS and HashiCorp Terraform in a free, safe, and sand-boxed environment. Bring your laptop and a web browser (no additional tools are needed to get started) and leave with tips and tricks that you can immediately apply to your own workflows.
Bio
Emma Higashikawa is a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, currently serving as a partner solutions architect for AWS GameDay. With a background in aerospace and satellite solutions, she focuses on cloud architecture, system design, and applied generative AI, helping partners and customers build and operate complex workloads on AWS. Emma began her career as a cloud developer and QA engineer at Amazon, and holds a mechanical engineering degree from Yale University, with additional academic experience in architecture and civil engineering from the University of Tokyo.
Sam McGeown is a senior developer advocate at HashiCorp and a long-time cloud and Kubernetes practitioner based in the UK. He has deep hands-on experience across public and private cloud, Kubernetes, Terraform, APIs, automation, and cloud-native platforms, with a background spanning consulting, product management, and technical marketing. Sam is known for translating complex infrastructure and DevOps concepts into practical guidance through talks, community content, and hands-on demos.
Russell Miles
ClearBank
Platforms Were Always the (Sword) Point
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Brittany Woods
Man Group
Refactoring Team Culture
Abstract
Improving the culture and experience of DevOps teams isn’t about adding more tools or piling on new processes; it’s about creating the conditions where people can thrive. When engineers feel empowered, supported, and trusted, they deliver not just code, but lasting impact for the business. Yet too often, teams get bogged down by friction: unclear ownership, unnecessary bureaucracy, or a lack of shared purpose.
In this talk, we’ll explore practical approaches and best practices for building healthier, more effective DevOps cultures. Drawing from real-world experiences and lessons learned from leading platform, governance, and engineering teams, I’ll share strategies for fostering autonomy without chaos, encouraging collaboration without micromanagement, and aligning technical teams with business outcomes.
You’ll walk away with actionable ideas you can start applying immediately: whether it’s creating internal communities that inspire innovation, building platforms that teams actually want to use, or rethinking leadership habits that might be unintentionally holding people back. The ultimate goal is helping your teams become more empowered, efficient, and impactful while creating an environment where great engineering work can truly flourish
Bio
Brittany Woods is the Head of Systems Engineering at Man Group, where she leads global teams across cloud automation, platform engineering, SRE, and developer experience. She is an engineering director with deep experience building and scaling reliable platforms, mentoring high performing teams, and contributing to technology strategy at enterprise scale. Brittany has held senior leadership and engineering roles at organizations including H and R Block, the LEGO Group, and CARFAX, and is a frequent speaker and published author on DevOps culture, team health, and engineering excellence.
Steve Fenton
Octopus Deploy
What if DevOps was really simple?
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Maryna Rybalko
Paydock
Building Reliability at Scale: Culture and Collaboration in a Fintech Powering the World’s Largest Banks
Abstract
What does reliability truly mean when building critical payment infrastructure for the world’s largest banks? In regulated and mission-critical industries like fintech, reliability is not just about technology. It is shaped by culture, collaboration, and everyday ways of working. Organisations powering platforms for multi-billion-dollar enterprises quickly learn that reliability depends on how people work across functions, make decisions under pressure, and learn from failure in highly constrained environments.
This talk goes beyond uptime and SLAs to explore the human and collaborative foundations of reliability. We will examine what practices help prevent incidents before they occur and how teams respond effectively when issues arise. Communication, and the way teams communicate, plays a central role in shaping operational reliability and decision-making in complex, regulated environments. Drawing on real-world experience running critical fintech infrastructure, the session shares practical insights to design culture and ways of working, helping organisations maintain reliability and resilience without slowing innovation.
Bio
Maryna Rybalko is a Product and Technology Leader with over seven years of experience in FinTech and HRTech, building B2B and B2B2C solutions for major financial institutions and global platforms. Formerly Platform Engineering Lead at Jooble, she has managed teams of 70+ specialists and published thought leadership on Platform Engineering and Software Development, reaching audiences of 175K–4M monthly. Maryna has spoken at major industry events and was recognised with the 2025 Women in Tech Excellence Award for “Team Leader of the Year – Finance.”
Ben Pearce
Elevated You
Using Technical Storytelling To Influence Your Stakeholders
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Ellie Rahimi
Trainline
Path to AWS OpenSearch: When Serverless Goes Wrong
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Jake Page
MetalBear
Validation Valley: A Quest Through Modern Development's Unsolved Bottlenecks
Abstract
AI has gotten really good at writing code, but it's also exposed some bottlenecks that were always there, just not at the front of our minds.
In Kubernetes environments especially, code rarely works on the first try. You're dealing with services, APIs, auth, infrastructure that all need to play nicely together. And AI
agents? They still have to wait for CI/CD pipelines just like the rest of us. The bottleneck has quietly shifted from writing code to validating it.
This talk doesn't have slides. Instead, we'll progress through a pixel-art RPG game together, where we’ll try to make our way through bottleneck canyon, exploring two domains where these bottlenecks have become impossible to ignore: open
source security (where maintainers are overwhelmed by low-quality, often AI-generated reports) and the inner developer loop (where faster code generation hasn't made the waiting
any shorter).
By the end of the quest, we'll arrive at a common thread connecting both problems, and I'll demo how tools like mirrord let AI agents test code directly against live Kubernetes
environments, validating and self-correcting without waiting in line.
It's a bit different. Hopefully it's also useful.
Bio
Jake Page is a former high-school teacher turned DevOps engineer and now DevRel Engineer. Over the past five years, he has focused on cloud-native developer tooling across packaging, software delivery, FinOps, testing, and debugging, often with a strong Kubernetes angle. Now based in Lisbon, Jake is passionate about learning by doing and frequently speaks at meetups and conferences.
Ethan Chung
H9 Foundry
Here be (AI) Dragons: Shipping Faster AI-Accelerated DevOps with Guardrails
Abstract
AI is changing how teams build, test, and ship software—but speed only matters if reliability and security keep up. This talk shares practical ways to combine modern DevOps and platform practices with AI-assisted workflows to accelerate delivery without increasing risk. We’ll look at where AI helps most across the delivery lifecycle, what “guardrails-first” looks like in practice, and how progressive delivery and observability create safer, faster releases. The session is designed to be broadly applicable across industries, toolchains, and team maturity levels.
Bio
Ethan Chung is a Senior Sales Engineering Leader and founder of H9 Foundry, providing bringing together GTM, technology and product lead innovation augmented.
Previously, he led CloudBees SE team across EMEA & APAC and working with enterprises to modernise CI/CD, platform practices, and software delivery governance.
Previously, he led Solution Engineering at Keysight and delivered enterprise-scale presales and transformation work across DevOps, observability, and developer productivity. Ethan also founded ePupp, a platform product focused on ethical pet adoption and data-driven matching, which sharpened his bias for practical, outcome-led engineering. He speaks about accelerating delivery safely—combining modern DevOps practices, platform thinking, and pragmatic AI adoption.
Joe Woodhouse
Prima Donna Consulting
You Can't Outsource Production Judgement to Unqualified Systems
Abstract
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
Bio
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.
Benjamin Eliot Newton
ziggiz
Roll for Collaboration! Power sharing between Data and Developer
Abstract
In every great campaign, no single class can conquer the dungeon alone. The modern enterprise is no different. This talk explores how Platform, Data, Security, and Development teams can stop acting like rival guilds and start adventuring as a unified party.
Bio
Benjamin Newton is a currently Founder & Staff Engineer at ziggiz: working on solving some the hardest data platform challenges. He has been working in this game long enough that many of his earliest tech talks were explaining what DevOps was. Previously in his career, he has worked at several large financial institutions and consultancies. In most cases, he left them better off than before he arrived. He has built and lead many great teams: he is proud to say that many of his former graduates and trainees are now far superior to him, which means they must have learnt something!
Bruno Paiuca
Opsteam
The Anatomy of a Secure Request - Every Request Authorized in a Zero-Trust World
Abstract
In a Zero-Trust world, authentication is only step one. The real question is: should this principal be allowed to perform this action on this resource — right now?
This session shows how cloud-native platforms enforce fine-grained authorization with AWS Verified Permissions and the Cedar policy language. We’ll break down what happens after authentication — from token claims and identity context to resource relationships and real-time policy evaluation.
You’ll leave with a practical blueprint to:
Treat authorization as a first-class architecture layer
Move permissions out of application code into auditable policies
Enforce least privilege across microservices and multi-tenant systems
Ensure every API request is explicitly authorized — never implicitly trusted
If you’re building secure systems at scale, authorization becomes the true foundation of Zero Trust.
Bio
Bruno Paiuca is an SRE and founder of Opsteam, a consultancy specialized in mission-critical operations, SRE, and FinOps.
Husband of Nataly and proud dad of Aurora — named after AWS Aurora, and also because he dreams of traveling with his family to see the Aurora Borealis.
Passionate about technology and people, he helps companies build resilient, efficient, and secure cloud systems that empower teams to innovate with confidence.
Daniel Afonso
PagerDuty
The State of AI in Incident Response
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Tal Nordan
The Full Picture: Visualizing Service "Fullness" to Rethink Saturation Prevention
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Bruce Clark
Observes.io
When CI/CD Secrets Go Walkabout: Exfiltrating Service Credentials and Pivoting Into the Cloud
Abstract
Modern CI/CD systems are packed with powerful service credentials. These are often more powerful than the engineers who rely on them. In this talk, I will walk through how attackers can exfiltrate “secured” service credentials from CI/CD environments and use them to pivot deeper into cloud platforms.
We’ll explore how these credentials are stored, how pipelines unintentionally expose them, and how quickly an attacker can move from a compromised build job to full cloud exploitation. Expect a mix of real‑world patterns, a hands‑on demo, and practical guidance on how to lock things down before someone else takes them for a spin.
Bio
Founder, AppSec & DevSecOps engineer. Bruce brings over a decade of experience in senior roles across application development, infrastructure and security. He’s driven pipeline security improvements for global enterprises and is passionate about making security an enabler. In his spare time, Bruce builds cloud-based hacking labs on Pwned Labs, sharing his expert knowledge with the cybersecurity community and shining a light on the important and overlooked area of pipeline security.
Chris Addams
Anythink
I'm Not Supposed To Be Here. How I accidentally ended up building complex things that work when nobody notices.
Abstract
I got good at infrastructure because it kept getting in the way.
This talk is about what happens when you get tired of watching the same problem repeat. From PLCs with 6 month wait times to founders burning £10 million on backend plumbing instead of building their product. How getting out of the way, and staying invisible, helps everyone move faster. And how that new normal becomes shockingly obvious the moment it breaks.
I'll cover the architectural decisions behind Anythink: tenanted Kubernetes from day one, CI/CD as a product feature rather than internal tooling, and Landscaper, the in-house tool we built to handle tenant lifecycle, feature flagging, JWT and cross-tenant permissions, and act as the glue between Terraform, Kubernetes, and our entire infrastructure. Nothing off the shelf did what we needed, so we built it.
Two real deployments: a sports psychology app and an international music distributor that started on Microsoft Access and is now running on modern cloud infrastructure without even knowing it's doing DevOps.
The goal was always invisible infrastructure. Give developers the control they need, safe defaults, and nothing getting in the way of the product. This is how we got there.
Bio
Chris Addams is the founder of Anythink. He didn't plan to stay in tech.
After studying computer science he did transformation work with charities and businesses, then the industry pulled him back in. Almost twenty years later he'd led the technical programme for the Amazon Prime Video Europe launch, introduced DevOps to Tesco, helped kick off the DAZN sports streaming platform, and delivered 4,000% productivity improvements for a major UK internet service provider.
In 2015 he started independent work, including running DevOps transformation programmes with Contino. Doing maturity assessments across dozens of organisations, he kept seeing the same thing: from PLCs to scale-ups to startups, every business trying to solve the same infrastructure problems, over and over.
He built Anythink to fix that. Solo founder, small team, no venture backing. Infrastructure that works best when nobody notices it; built by someone who wasn't supposed to be here in the first place.
Mo Abukar
CoderCo
From "We Do DevOps" to Actually Doing DevOps
Abstract
Every team says they "do DevOps" - but saying it and living it are very different things. This talk is a real-world case study of walking into a fragmented engineering setup where DevOps was a job title, not a practice, and transforming it into a proper platform engineering function. I'll cover what we actually found on the ground - siloed teams, manual deployments, tribal knowledge, and the classic "it works on my machine" culture - and the practical steps we took to fix it. From consolidating tooling and building golden paths to changing how teams think about ownership, this is the honest, sometimes painful story of what it actually takes to go from DevOps theatre to real engineering excellence. No theory, no utopian architectures - just what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently next time.
Short Bio: Mo Abukar is a Principal Platform/DevOps Engineer, Co-Founder of CoderCo, and a platform engineering consultant who helps startups and scale-ups review their infrastructure, optimise costs, and build scalable platforms. With 7+ years of experience, Mo specialises in cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and internal developer platforms. He's taught DevOps and platform engineering to over 5,000 students worldwide, maintains open-source projects with nearly 1,000 GitHub followers, and regularly shares insights with his 80K+ LinkedIn community. Mo is a CNCF contributor who believes the best infrastructure is the kind developers actually want to use.
Bio
Mo Abukar is a Principal Platform/DevOps Engineer, Co-Founder of CoderCo, and a platform engineering consultant who helps startups and scale-ups review their infrastructure, optimise costs, and build scalable platforms. With 7+ years of experience, Mo specialises in cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and internal developer platforms. He's taught DevOps and platform engineering to over 5,000 students worldwide, maintains open-source projects with nearly 1,000 GitHub followers, and regularly shares insights with his 80K+ LinkedIn community. Mo is a CNCF contributor who believes the best infrastructure is the kind developers actually want to use.
Rafael Moraes Natali
Marionete
I Fought the Pod and the Pod Won: Breaking and Defending Kubernetes from Within
Abstract
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.
Bio
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).
Emiliano Mancuso
Fresha
Not Dead, Just Needs a Doctor
Abstract
Our databases weren't dead, but they weren't healthy either. And I was tired of answering the same questions. "Is this index being used?" "Why is vacuum not running?" "What version of Postgres are we on?" So I built pgdoctor - a CLI with opinionated health checks for PostgreSQL. Each check explains what it found and why it matters, but also gives you the exact command to fix it - because most engineers just want to know what to do.
It was a simple tool for a specific problem. But then our CTO picked up the pattern and built repo-doctor - same architecture, different domain. It analyses repositories for good and bad signals: Kubernetes configs, library choices, ownership files, documentation, dev setup. Each service gets a score. We collect those scores into a scoreboard visible to the whole engineering organisation, and suddenly we have a shared language to talk to product about technical health.
The architecture was simple enough to copy, the pattern was clear enough to follow, and frameworks like Bubbletea made building polished terminal interfaces surprisingly fast.
Bio
Emiliano Mancuso led Platform & Infrastructure at Fresha, designing the company’s core data and infrastructure foundations. His work bridges platform engineering and distributed systems to enable scalable, high-performance services across Fresha’s global platform. Originally from Argentina, Emiliano brings deep expertise in data architecture and a passion for building reliable systems.
Steve Poole
HeroDevs
“Just Upgrade” Is Not a DevOps Strategy
Abstract
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.
Bio
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
Matteo Emili
Avanade
What did it mean bringing Inner Source in an Enterprise?
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Nikolay Milyaev
Microsoft
Collapsing MTTR with Defender XDR: Correlation, Automation, Copilot, Measurement
Abstract
Most DevOps and SRE teams are now “accidental security teams”: they own CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and on-call, but they also inherit security alert storms from tools like Microsoft Defender XDR. In this talk, Nikolay shows how to collapse MTTR by turning thousands of noisy alerts across endpoint, identity, email, and SaaS into a small number of clear, repeatable workflows.
Nikolay will walk through a practical pipeline built on Microsoft-native capabilities:
Correlation: stitching scattered alerts into incidents that map to real on-call runbooks
Automation: safe first-mile patterns with Logic Apps that enrich, route, deduplicate, and contain without waking people up at 3am for nothing
Copilot: using Security Copilot to compress analysis and reporting time with guided summaries, hypothesis-driven questions, and draft KQL you can validate and run
Measurement: simple metrics and scorecards to prove “we reduced MTTR and noise” to both engineers and leadership
Bio
Nikolay Milyaev is a Senior Microsoft Consultant specializing in security and endpoint management, with expertise in Microsoft Defender XDR, Intune, Windows 365, and Azure environments. With over 19 years of experience at Microsoft Consulting Services (ISD), he has led the delivery of more than 50 large scale enterprise cybersecurity and endpoint management projects for global organizations. He is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer and an active AI enthusiast focused on modern security and device management strategies.
Rui Duarte
IG Group
DevOps Didn't Die - It Grew Up
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Bogdan Grigorescu
Direct Line Group
Ava - Conversational Experiences Delivered
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Anton Borisov
Fresha
PgBouncer in the K8s Dungeon
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Vladimir Pronin
Holland & Barrett
Platform Engineering for Mobile: Scaling 10 Squads with CI/CD, Flags & Observability
Abstract
This talk shares a real-world case study of scaling mobile delivery across 10+ product squads in a large omnichannel organisation.
Delivery bottlenecks led to the transformation of a centrally owned mobile app into a shared platform used by multiple squads. The session highlights the patterns that enabled safe, parallel delivery at scale: CI/CD ownership for mobile, backend-driven UI, feature flags for progressive rollout, and observability that connects releases to real user impact.
Together, these changes supported 3× growth in MAU, while allowing teams to move faster without increasing operational risk as many squads shipped through a single mobile app.
Bio
I am a Principal Product Manager at Holland & Barrett, where he leads app-first and platform transformation across multiple product teams. My background spans over 14 years in technology, starting in mobile engineering and evolving into senior product leadership, which allows me to work comfortably across strategy, platform, and execution.
Alongside my role at Holland & Barrett, I’m an entrepreneur and co-founder of Nova Ocean and Mindlist, where I continue to build and scale consumer products. I’m passionate about turning complex platforms into simple, valuable customer experiences, building strong cross-functional teams, and helping organisations move beyond transactional products toward long-term customer value.
Miko Pawlikowski
Tech Author, Podcast Host
Keynote: I Was Promised a Beach: Why AI Hasn’t Taken Your Pager (Yet)
Abstract
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.
Bio
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.
Dewan Ahmed
Harness
Reverse Keynote: Secure by Default: Building Confidence in AI-Driven Delivery
Abstract
The fastest way to break trust in DevSecOps is to automate insecurity at scale. As AI takes a central role in our pipelines, it is time to rethink what "secure by default" really means.
In this keynote, Dewan Ahmed will challenge the audience to look beyond vulnerability scanners and compliance gates. He will share a vision for intelligent security by design, where native intelligence within the delivery platform detects not only vulnerable code but risky delivery behavior such as misconfigured environments, suspicious artifact provenance, and drift between source and runtime.
You will walk away with a framework for balancing automation with human oversight and examples from Harness’ work on building verifiable, auditable, AI-native delivery systems. In the new world of DevSecOps, safety is not a step; it is an outcome we continuously learn to improve.
Bio
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.
