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FinOps User Group First Meet
Thu, Sep 24, 1:30 PMWe're kicking off the first Lens FinOps get-together, a chance for members of the group to meet in person, share what they're working on, and talk shop on FinOps. **On the day:** * Meet and greet. Come introduce yourself and get to know the rest of the group. * Overview of what was announced at Tokenomicon the day before in Amsterdam. * Challenge Clinic. With minds from all over the FinOps space in the same room, it makes sense to share the biggest challenges we're trying to solve. There's a decent chance someone in the room will have some useful insight. Don't be shy to raise any issues you're having, and don't be afraid to speak up if you think you can help. * Roundtable discussion: SaaS FinOps. Bring your questions and anything you're willing to share with the group. **Dinner:** for anyone who'd like to keep the conversation going, we'll head to The Rajasthan locally afterwards. If you are likely to be attending the dinner please message in the group and we will reserve the right amount of space. Looking forward to seeing you all there.
🎄Xmas Cards To Elderly in Care Homes
Sun, Sep 13, 11:00 AMWe will be writing Christmas cards with warm festive messages to elderly people in residential care homes. It is a sad reality that many people in residential care do not receive regular visits — a problem that hits them even harder at Christmas. This small act of kindness can help them to not feel as lonely during the Christmas period. Join us, and send some smiles across the miles to those who need them most. I’ll provide the Xmas cards and all the writing material you will need to brighten someone’s day. All you need to bring is your wonderful self! If it’s your first time, don't worry, I’ll have guidelines and inspirational suggestions. \*\*\* POLITE REMINDERS\*\*\* * If you click to attend but then can’t come, PLEASE change your RSVP to say you are no longer attending. This will then allow your space to go to another volunteer who can come instead. * This is a safe and respectful gathering. So please remember to always act respectfully and to be mindful of each other's boundaries. \*\*\* HOW TO FIND US \*\*\* We will be in Paul’s, which is just opposite Earls Court tube station. Look for the table with lots of stationary on it!
AWS User Group UK Meetup #79
Wed, Sep 23, 5:00 PMWelcome to our September event. We’re delighted to welcome [Yan Cui](https://www.linkedin.com/in/theburningmonk/), AWS Serverless Hero, independent consultant and [Martin Thwaites](https://www.linkedin.com/in/martindotnet/), Principal Developer Advocate, Honeycomb.io Here’s what they’re bringing: Event-driven architecture solves your coupling problem and hands you three new ones. Yan has run production workloads on AWS since 2009 and has trained thousands of developers on EventBridge and Lambda, so he knows exactly where the neat whiteboard diagram falls apart: tracing a request with no call stack, changing an event without breaking consumers you don’t control, and failures that land minutes after the original request. Tonight **Yan** is giving us the patterns that hold up in production - event envelopes that give you versioning, idempotency and tracing for free, end-to-end tests that stay inside your own bounded context, and a hard look at where governance earns its overhead. 65,000 attendees. Four days. A booth game that has to survive the moment a keynote ends. Martin built Battleships for the Honeycomb booth on EKS, then rebuilt it on Lambda MicroVMs the month they launched, giving every player their own machine with no shared state and no pod to fight over. Tonight **Martin** is walking us through the rebuild: the cost modelling against EKS, what changed once a session owned a whole VM, and the instrumentation that tells him the game is degrading before an attendee does. A big thank you to our sponsors [Cloudscaler](https://rebrand.ly/cloudscaler) & [Rayo](https://rebrand.ly/rayo-cloud). **Programme:** **18:00:** Arrival, registration **18:15: Talks start** **20:00:** Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors. **Session 1:** ***Event-driven architecture: the hard parts*** ***with Yan Cui*** Event-driven architectures are great at helping teams build loosely coupled, scalable systems - but the neat architecture diagrams rarely show the difficult bits. In practice, they hand you a fresh set of problems that nobody warns you about at the whiteboard stage. Once events start flowing across multiple services and bounded contexts, new challenges emerge. How do you trace a request end-to-end when there’s no longer a simple call stack? How do you change an event without unexpectedly breaking consumers you don’t control? And how do you test and operate a system where failures can happen asynchronously, perhaps minutes after the original request? In this talk, Yan will explore the practical lessons and patterns that make event-driven architectures work in production, including: * End-to-end observability as events flow across services and asynchronous boundaries * Testing strategies within bounded contexts, and deciding what should, and shouldn’t, be tested end-to-end * Schema evolution and how to change events safely without breaking existing consumers * Catching integration problems early, before they reach production * Error handling, retries and idempotency, including dealing with duplicate and out-of-order events * Documentation and governance so teams can understand which events exist, who owns them and how they should be used Drawing on real-world experience building event-driven systems on AWS, Yan will look beyond the happy path and focus on the trade-offs, failure modes and engineering practices that help these architectures remain manageable as systems and teams grow. **Learning Takeaways** * How to design an event envelope that gives you versioning, idempotency and tracing for free * Why “no breaking changes” often beats every event versioning scheme, and how to enforce it * A practical way to scope end-to-end tests so they don’t spill into other teams’ systems * Where governance is worth the operational overhead, and where it just slows you down **Yan** is an AWS Serverless Hero and independent consultant who has run production workloads on AWS since 2009. He helps teams go faster for less with serverless, and has trained thousands of developers through his Production-Ready Serverless workshops. A prolific writer and speaker, his articles on AWS and serverless have been read millions of times. **Session 2:** ***Every Player Gets a VM: Prepping Battleships for re:Invent Scale*** ***with Martin Thwaites*** My job is not to build games, but it is to make our booths engaging, and Battleships is my latest creation. The first version ran on EKS, which meant a mostly idle cluster for something that only runs a few days at a time. And then I needed to think about re:Invent and its 65,000 attendees. When Lambda MicroVMs launched in June I rebuilt it, giving every player their own VM with its own dedicated memory and no shared state to fight over, scaling out as far as the queue at the booth demands. You will learn the nuances I hit along the way, how the move changed the architecture once a game session had a whole machine to itself rather than a slice of a pod, and the constraints I am designing around for the moment a keynote ends and the expo hall fills up. I’ll show the cost modelling against EKS and the instrumentation going in so that I will know the game is working before an attendee tells me it isn’t. **Learning Takeaways** * Compare the cost of a persistently provisioned EKS cluster against per-session Lambda MicroVMs for spiky, short-lived workloads, using real modelling rather than intuition. * Rework an architecture once a session owns a whole machine rather than a slice of a pod - which shared state disappears, and which new constraints take its place. * Instrument a system so you know it is degrading before a user tells you, and design around the failure modes of a hard, unmovable traffic spike. **Martin** is a Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb and a contributor to OpenTelemetry’s .NET libraries. He has spent the last seven years working in observability, following a twenty-year engineering career building large-scale systems. His focus is distributed tracing and telemetry pipelines in cloud-native environments. He advocates for observability as a core part of software engineering, something owned by the engineers building software, not just the teams operating it. Do you have a story to share? If you are interested in speaking at one of our events, please check out our[call for papers here](https://awsuguk.org/call-for-papers/). We are advocates for greater inclusion & diversity in UK Tech and are especially keen to receive talk submissions from people in underrepresented groups. If you are interested in speaking at a future meetup but would like to discuss what to expect or need assistance, please contact our Inclusion & Diversity Lead Natalie Gray - graynataliej@gmail.com or DM her [@natjgray](https://twitter.com/natjgray) Check out our [website](https://awsuguk.org/) for more information about our community and our code of conduct. Remember to follow us @AWSUserGroupUK and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aws-ug-uk) for the latest updates, and you can find videos of our past meetups [here](https://awsuguk.org/our-videos/).
Balancers Community Volunteering - Clothing Distribution
Thu, Sep 10, 5:00 PMHi Balancers, We believe community is about more than meeting new people. It's also about showing up for those who need support. As part of our ongoing partnership with Refugee Community Kitchen, we're inviting you to join us for a different kind of volunteering session. This time, we’re joining **Refugee Community Kitchen (RCK)** at their Goodge Street service to provide essential clothing to people who need it. 👕 **HOW IT WORKS** We’ll meet at **6:00 PM in front of the Dominion Theatre**. From there, we’ll cross the road to Primark and split into small groups. Each group will be given a few essential clothing items to find and buy. Once we’re done, we’ll walk about **5 minutes to Goodge Street**, join the RCK service and distribute the clothing while their team serves food. 💷 **CHIPPING IN** We’ll collect contributions from the group and use the full amount to buy the clothing that evening. If you can, **bring some cash** — but there’s absolutely no pressure to contribute much. Even **£1 helps**, and you’re just as welcome to volunteer regardless of how much you contribute. 💬 **Join our Volunteer WhatsApp group for updates and coordination:** [https://chat.whatsapp.com/Hzm7P7Tr0QD92MnwmpHTVK?s=cl&p=a&ilr=1](https://chat.whatsapp.com/Hzm7P7Tr0QD92MnwmpHTVK?s=cl&p=a&ilr=1) 🤝 **NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED** We’ll explain everything on the day. Just bring yourself and be ready to help. **Good to know:** 📍 Meet: In front of the Dominion Theatre ⏰ 6:00 PM 👕 Primark is directly across the road 🚶 Goodge Street is around 5 minutes away As always, Respect, Kindness and Authenticity come first. We’re there to support people with dignity and without judgment. Let’s keep showing what our community can do when we act with heart. See you there 💛
AWS London Well-Architected User Group September Meetup!
Thu, Sep 17, 5:30 PMHi Architects, Welcome to our the 7th AWS London Well-Architected User Group Meetup!!! 🥳🥳🥳 Dragon Hall Trust, 17 Stukeley Street, London WC2B 5LT The AWS London Well-Architected Meetup is the latest chapter in the most popular AWS Meetup group globally. At each meetup we cover off various pillars of AWS best-practice in detail including insights from industry leaders that specialise in the Well-Architected Framework. We’ll be updating throughout the month with more speakers and our speakers so far this month include: * James Harding \- TCSM @ Green Custard \\\| Work Smarter: Tooling Strategies for a More Effective Well\-Architected Review * Mahendran Selvakumar \- Senior Cloud & DevSecOps Engineer @ Tata Consultancy Services \| How I Built an AWS Well\-Architected MCP Server So come join us at 6.30pm for a 7.00pm start, including drinks, snacks and friendly networking after our talks :-)
GoodGym Kingston // Group Session // Do Good & Get Fit
Tue, Sep 22, 5:30 PM**PLEASE VISIT THE WEBSITE TO CONFIRM SESSION DETAILS AND LET US KNOW YOU PLAN TO ATTEND. THIS IS MANDATORY.** **Want to do something useful with your exercise? GoodGym is no ordinary gym. We're a group of people who get fit by doing good - helping out local charities and community groups with physical jobs like shifting compost and planting trees.** **📍 We meet at** **The Quaker Centre, Fairfield, Kingston Upon Thames, KT1 2PT** **at 6:30pm.** **🏃♂️ At 6:45pm we'll run, walk or cycle to do a 30-40 minute task.** **🏃♂️ Then we'll head back to where we started by 8:30pm, do some stretches and maybe grab a beverage?** It's FREE. It's fun. It's fulfilling. And we're a very friendly bunch. 🍇 — **BOOK ONTO THE SESSION** **To come to the session click here:** https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions **You will need to confirm your attendance on the GoodGym website** (this includes creating an account with us if you haven’t already - it only takes a few mins). The link above takes you to the session listings in your area - if this session doesn’t fit your schedule, you may find something that does so check it out. p.s. GoodGym is a charity and you will be asked whether you’d like to donate when first creating an account. The choice is yours and does not affect your ability to attend a session. — **FAQ** Not sure you'll keep up? GoodGym is for everyone (18+). Whether you've never run before, or are chasing a marathon PB, you are 100% welcome. We always have a back-marker so no one gets left behind. 70% of GoodGym members start as non-runners so if you're new to this kind of thing you will be supported by people who are all on the same journey. 👍 What do I need to wear? Most of us wear gym/running gear. Make sure you're prepared for the weather. Don't feel like you're fit enough? Our tasks are simple and fun. There are easy jobs as well as more challenging things for those who want a workout! The choice is always yours. Do I need to bring anything? Gardening gloves are really useful for a lot of GoodGym tasks. And a head torch too if it’s likely to get dark. Please bring some if you can but there’s no requirement 🧤💡🧤 What is GoodGym? We're a (really lovely) group of people who use our energy to make a difference in our local community (and in communities across the UK!). We often meet on a weeknight, at least once a week, for a session to do good and get fit. We'd love you to come and join us. Any questions, just pop a comment below or send me a message. Find out everything you need to know at goodgym.org
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