This edition of our meet-up will be sponsored by Kong: https://konghq.com, with support from D2iQ (https://d2iq.com) and YLD (https://yld.io).

The evening's running order will be as follows:

6:30pm - Food and drink, sponsored by Kong
6:55pm - Welcome
7:00pm - Containerisation - A K8s Story (Matt Smith, Capgemini)
7:45pm - Break
8:00pm - Distributed microservices abstraction layers with Kong (Thijs Schreijer, Kong)
8:45pm - Wrap up, pub

· Containerisation - A K8s Story (Matt Smith, Capgemini)

In 2017, Matt was part of an engineering team tasked with building a scalable platform for a new application being developed for one of Capgemini's clients. After attempting to build a Pivotal Cloud Foundry-based platform, Matt and the team turned away from PCF and towards Kubernetes. This is a success story for Kubernetes and shows how easy Kubernetes really is to get up and running.

Matt Smith is a Software Engineer Lead in the Open Source Cloud Engineering (OSCE) Team at Capgemini. As a lover of design, clean code, automation and full stack development, one tends to find Matt drawing on whiteboards or sat at his laptop building solutions with Kubernetes, Java, Node.js, Read and more! With a passion for The Arts and Philosophy, you'll also find Matt often sat at a piano being pretentious and full of himself. He apologies in advance for this inevitability.

· Distributed microservices abstraction layers with Kong (Thijs Schreijer, Kong)

Kong is a cloud-native, fast, scalable, and distributed Microservice Abstraction Layer (also known as an API Gateway, API Middleware or in some cases Service Mesh). Made available as an open-source project in 2015, its core values are high performance and extensibility.

During this talk we’ll give an introduction to what Kong can do, and do a short demonstration of the Kong Ingress Controller for Kubernetes.

Thijs Schreijer has been working in IT for almost 25 years. He had many different roles from management consultant to service manager to software engineer, in just as many disciplines, infrastructure, outsourcing, testing and software development. He joined the startup Kong Inc in 2015 and is currently holding the position of Solutions Architect at Kong Inc where he helps clients in making the transition to microservices.