Last week we organized our first DevOps Exchange meetup which we sponsored alongside Equal Experts. Although there are other DevOps meetups in London (for which we’re regular attendees of) we decided to host our own after talking to lots of companies that wanted to get into DevOps but didn’t know where to start. Many of the current meetups tend to be for experienced DevOps people in our opinion, and although we don’t plan to be the meetup for beginners, we hope we can give at least one introduction talk to beginners (and their bosses) at each meetup to bring more people into this highly demanded field.

We plan to host the meetup every 2 months, with 3 great speakers, and free beer/pizza afterwards. We also will be filming the event so that the rest of our community can watch the talks afterwards online. Each meetup will have a theme around a certain topic. Our first one was “The Goal of DevOps” - an introduction into what DevOps is, how to start doing it in companies and a real life example of what it looks like on a large scale service. Future theme’s will be around MicroServices, Monitoring, Configuration Management, Continuous Delivery to name a few.

Overall we got loads of great feedback from the almost 50 attendees that made it (despite Meetup.com being DDOS’d just before the event so some people couldn’t get the details from the site or contact us!) and will be shortly announcing the next event date towards the end of April and the theme.

If you’d like the join the next meetup or get announcements on when videos are published then you can join the meetup group here (assuming its not down from the DDOS attack!): http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Exchange-London

Here are the videos and slides from our first 3 speakers! You can also see some photos from the event here. Enjoy :)

Steven Acreman - The Goal of DevOps

Steven (our CTO & Co-Founder at Outlyer) discusses his view on what is DevOps and what the goal of DevOps really is.

Paul Robinson & Surfraz Ahmed - DevOps Challenges, An Insiders View

Paul & Surfraz from Equal Experts share their experience with bringing DevOps to large organizations, with some of the challenges and best practices to ensure a smooth transition.

Sam Pointer - DevOps @ Space Ape Games

Sam talks about how they do DevOps at Space Ape Games, a large successful online games service with millions of users. Sam has years of experience running these types of services so also shares some of his lessons learned.


Don’t forget to sign up for our meetup if you enjoyed the talks! http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Exchange-London