DevOps Oxford - August 25

Talk #1: Emmanuel Ahaiwe (Lead DevOps Engineer @ Qore)

Driving Business Value with Product-Led LeadershipDevOps department in an organisation is not a silo but a business function and requirement whose output is measured by the compliance achieved, risk avoided, ease of deployment, scalability, cost management, service uptime and customers confidence. There is the risk of evaluating DevOps purely on engineering based metrics like uptime and build speed. However, a true representation of DevOps is its evaluation on business KPIs like successful transactions, regulatory pass rates and latency. Product Leadership reframes DevOps from, “how many deployments a day” to “how many safe, compliant, fault tolerant, optimised deployments were delivered”.

The presence of Product Leadership does not simply make DevOps practice more efficient, it compounds in value over time and has immense returns on people and processes. It is a key requirement in shaping the culture of a company. There are fewer regulatory surprises as compliance is integrated into every infrastructure pipeline, mitigating against unplanned rework in late stages of release and fines. Features are tested with real user behavior and not just engineering success metrics. This creates a robust product and customer retention.

Infrastructure, vendor spend and all business costs are mapped to the economy of unit cost, making sure the company minimises financial leakages and DevOps is not left to vanity technical projects.

Talk #2: Ebru Cucen: Founder @ Bridgelabs

The AI-Augmented Engineer:What LLMs *Really* Mean for DevOps

Bio: Ebru is currently working on her startup to develop intelligence for small language models so that we can get smart results without burning resources.

She is an architect and strategist with over 20 years of experience designing resilient, scalable, cross-platform systems and multi-cloud transformation projects, sometimes for billion-dollar valued startups, like Kidsloop, or multinational banks DeutscheBank, LloydsBank.

She bumped into devops space without knowing, dramatically cut test environment deployments at BUPA by 98% (from 2 weeks to 2 hours) in 2009, and working on AI-related topics for the last couple of years. She is a proud member of the winning team of Oxford AI Hackathon, with vibe coding and conversational-AI.

She was also an editor of Beginning DevOps book covers Azure, Docker, Kubernetes and author of the book Connecting the Dots: Harness the Power of Graphs & ML. ‎

The Talk: The rise of Large Language Models is more than just a productivity boost—it's a fundamental shift in the DevOps landscape. In this session, Ebru will guide you through the new era of intelligent automation, moving beyond simple prompt engineering to the world of autonomous AI agents.

We'll explore how these most recent developments and tools that can interact with your systems, and the role of Model Context Protocol (MCP).

She will walk through the use cases from generating Infrastructure as Code to automating incident response, you'll gain a clear, practical understanding of how this technology works. More importantly, you will see how it transforms the role of the DevOps engineer from a tactical implementer to a strategic orchestrator of intelligent systems.

📢 Become a Speaker! 📢

Have something to say? We want to listen! We are always looking for new speakers who want to share their adventures within DevOps. Please contact Joseph@humand.co.uk