Wednesday 21 August, 17:30
Massive thanks to Board Intelligence for hosting our inaugural meetup – and to everyone that came that made the evening such a success! Our two speakers discussed some of the challenges faced in building secure and scalable infrastructure, with or without the Cloud.
Our first speaker, Patrik Sundberg, provided a deep dive into the challenges that the team at Board Intelligence have run into whilst creating and supporting a complex infrastructure with a lean team.
It can be hard to effectively manage and support 1000s of client specific instances at the best of times. If you can't outsource some of the heavy lifting to public cloud providers, it becomes harder still.
Board Intelligence is used by the Boards and Executive teams of some of the UK’s biggest companies to facilitate effective and strategic decision-making in the boardroom. This creates unique challenges as they deal with highly commercially sensitive data and demanding VIP customers, which means security and stability of the platform are at the forefront of everything they do.
Following Patrik, we heard from Len Bellemore, Platform Engineering Manager @ Elsevier, who offered a contrasting experience solving similar problems in the Cloud on AWS. Len focused on how Elsevier are trying to solve problems at an international level, serving content to tens of millions of people daily, whilst also touching on some of the downsides of the public Cloud in his talk titled The Ups and Downs of Going Cloud Native.
Both presentations were followed by a round of insightful questions from the audience, allowing the two speakers to flesh out their ideas and how their teams arrived at the solutions they are currently using.
You can watch videos of the main talks and stages of the evening below, as well as being able to find out more about our speakers and event organisers.
Patrik Sundberg, Consultant at Board Intelligence, delivers a deep dive into the challenges they have faced whilst creating and supporting a complex infrastructure without the public Cloud.
Patrik Sundberg, Consultant at Board Intelligence, takes questions from the floor following his talk on how Board Intelligence are using in-house solutions to solve infrastructure issues without the public Cloud.
Len Bellemore, Platform Engineering Manager at Elsevier, provides a contrasting experience to our first talk, detailing how his team are solving similar infrastructure problems by embracing the public Cloud with AWS and Cloudflare. His talk outlines how Elsevier are able to scale their services at an international level, serving content to tens of millions of people daily, before also touching on some of the downsides of the public Cloud.
Len Bellemore, Platform Engineering Manager at Elsevier, takes questions from the floor following his talk on how the ScienceDirect team have embraced the public Cloud, edge computing and the overall AWS ecosystem.
Patrik Sundberg, Consultant at Board Intelligence, delivers a deep dive into the challenges they have faced whilst creating and supporting a complex infrastructure without the public Cloud.
Patrik's background is eclectic including topics ranging from assembly programming to data analysis and commodities trading. At Board Intelligence his main involvement has been with stabilising, improving and extending the architecture of the company's bespoke infrastructure, deployment and operations solutions.
Len works as a Platform Engineering Manager at Elsevier with a team of DevOps and Cloud infrastructure developers on their ScienceDirect product. He was a decent sysadmin once up on a time, but now concentrates on trying to be a great manager of talented people.
After spending everyday for 6+ years talking about technology, I finally caught the coding bug myself about six months ago. Since then I’ve thrown myself into the world of modern JavaScript and through a combination of online learning, workshops and meetups I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere.
It gives me great pleasure that the first meetup we’re running is in partnership with Board Intelligence. I’ve been working closely with their engineering team for the past 12 months to help them attract some of the very best engineering talent in London. One of the key things that’s helped attract such great talent to Board Intelligence is the unique technical challenges they face, so I’m really looking forward to the evening's discussions.