Last week we hosted the first Disruptive Tech meetup in London, where Dinesh Majrekar, CTO at Civo, Alejandro J. Nuñez Madrazo, Golang Developer at Civo, Chris Nesbitt-Smith, Digital Transformation Consultant, and Gillian Vanhauwaert, Penetration Tester Team Lead at Defense.com, took to the stage to speak about all things cloud technologies. During this in-person meetup, we discussed various topics, from putting your pet Kubernetes down to hacking the cloud and provisioning your cloud infrastructure.

Don't worry if you missed out on the event! We've got you covered. We've compiled the most important highlights and key takeaways from every talk, so you can catch up on everything you missed. Keep reading this blog post to find out more.

Provision your cloud infrastructure directly with kubectl using OpenCP

The evening started with Dinesh Majrekar and Alejandro J. Nuñez Madrazo discussing the newly launched open source project OpenCP.


With an ongoing problem surrounding the complexity of managing your clusters, OpenCP aims to provision your cloud infrastructure using kubectl. This talk outlined how the OpenCP architecture can help make your deployment and management of Kubernetes infrastructure on multi-cloud environments easier with a live demo on how to get it set up.

For more information on OpenCP, check out the GitHub repository here.

Is it time to put your pet Kubernetes down

In the talk, Chris Nesbitt-Smith used the "pets vs. cattle" analogy to compare manual server maintenance to automated server replacement in Kubernetes. While Kubernetes automates server replacement, the initial setup and configuration of Kubernetes clusters can be challenging, making it difficult to manage clusters efficiently. This can create challenges for day-to-day operations and managing clusters running different versions. The talk concludes by discussing how cloud infrastructure operates, treating infrastructure as a commodity that frees businesses from worrying about hardware failures and router patching.

Hacking the cloud and things to watch out for

Why should we be discussing cloud security in terms of internal infrastructure?

This is exactly what Gillian Vanhauwaert spoke about in the final talk of the evening, as she outlined how aspects such as vendor lock-in, external facing, and phishing can impact your journey into the cloud.

Open mic talks

After the first two talks were complete, it came to the part of the night where we took a break and refreshed our minds for the final talk while discussing or networking with our fellow attendees. In light of this, we opened the floor to any members of the audience that would like to take to the stage and discuss anything they are passionate about that they believe would be beneficial for others or recent hot topics.

Sal Kimmich, Director of Open Source at EscherCloud, took the opportunity to grab the mic and discuss the hot topic ChatGPT. This looked at how much you should trust ChatGPT in helping you code, the challenges of overcoming intellectual property that it may scrape from the web, and not being afraid of the new tech but enjoying it as the most trusted tech is the tech you verify and scrutinize yourself.

Rajesh Muthusamy, Lead DevOps Engineer at Cognizant, also left their seat to offer their insight and opinions into DevOps versus Platform Engineering.

In our mission to create a unique meetup, we are looking to accept CFP-like proposals in the future for those in the community that want to talk at our meetups, so keep an eye out to get involved.

Until next time

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