Cloud & DevOps Events in Manchester

🗒️ About the event

Join Grafana & Friends Manchester at bet365 for an evening of talks, live demos, and community conversation!
We’ll explore how to build dashboards that work for your whole team, find the performance limits of an LLM service, and bring observability to a classic arcade game. Expect practical examples, ideas to try in your own projects, and the chance to put your driving skills to the test! 🏎️

📅 Thursday 22 October 2026
🕕 17:45–20:00

📍 bet365, Zenith Building, just off Market Street, between Manchester Piccadilly and Victoria stations. The host team will welcome you downstairs, check you in and escort you up to the event.

📋 Agenda
17:45 · Welcome, food, and refreshments 🍕
Meet fellow community members and grab a bite before the talks begin.
18:15 · Talks and live demos 🎙️

🎙️ One dashboard, a thousand contexts
Speaker: Mihaela Maior, Director Engineering, Grafana Labs
How do you build one dashboard that serves your entire team, instead of maintaining ten conflicting copies?
Mihaela will explore filters, multi-property variables, and variables defined at the instance, folder, dashboard, and section levels. Through demos and practical examples, you’ll learn how to use these features to adapt a single dashboard to different contexts.

🎙️ How much traffic can your GPU really handle before an LLM service starts to fall apart?
Speakers: Ben Kaimogul, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Callcare Ltd, and Ruth Kegicha, Innovation Discovery Manager
What happens when an LLM application reaches its limits? In this live, hands-on session, Ben and Ruth will put a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application running on vLLM and NVIDIA T4 GPUs under increasing load—and watch what happens with Prometheus, Grafana, and k6.
Using tests that behave like real users, they’ll connect user experience with inference metrics to explore latency, throughput, queue depth, token generation, and GPU saturation. You’ll learn how to distinguish a busy system from a saturated one, and leave with a practical approach to capacity testing, plus demo code, k6 scripts, and reusable Grafana dashboards.

🎙️ Taking Out Run from the Arcade into Grafana with OpenTelemetry
Speaker: Simon Prickett, Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs
Observability isn’t just for infrastructure! Simon will demonstrate how he instrumented the classic ’80s arcade driving game Out Run using the OpenTelemetry SDK for C++.
Follow the journey from capturing traces, logs, and screenshots in Tempo and Loki to exploring the results in Grafana dashboards, including the new GraphViz panel for data-driven diagrams.
Aspiring racers can take the wheel during networking, with Grafana helping us crown champions for the highest score, most overtakes, and longest clean driving streak! 🏆

20:00 · Wrap-up 💬

Whether you’re a developer, DevOps or SRE engineer, AI practitioner, or simply curious about Grafana and observability, you’re welcome. Come along to learn, share ideas, and meet the Manchester community!

#Grafana #Observability #OpenTelemetry #Prometheus #k6 #AI #DevOps #SRE

We containerised because Docker gave us clean, consistent shipping and deployment without drama. But we drew a hard line between containerisation as a deployment tool and orchestration as a scaling strategy. That distinction matters more than most teams realise before they have already committed to the heavier path.

This talk walks through how we scaled a production .NET financial system and its API layer without over-provisioning or container orchestration, using what the .NET ecosystem already gives you before reaching for anything exotic.

We will cover how we identified where the real bottlenecks actually were, how we kept the API surface clean under growing requests, and what we learned about the true cost of complexity when you are the one maintaining it at 2am.

This is a talk for .NET engineers who have felt the pressure to adopt heavyweight infrastructure and wondered whether there was a more deliberate path.

Venue

This meeting is at Betfred in Steam Packet House, 72 - 76 Cross St, Manchester M2 4JG.

There will be signs at the street door or someone in the lobby to tell you how to get to the right floor.

This is a free event - there is no charge for a ticket.
We often get enough RSVP's for there to be a waiting list; the list has always cleared by the early part of the week of the talk, but this relies on you releasing your ticket if you can no longer attend. Please remember to do this if your plans change.

Please ensure we have an email address that you do look at, so we can let you know of any last minute changes; and please use your full name on the site as it's the only way we, or the fire service, can account for you in the case of an evacuation/emergency/fire etc.

Catering will be provided, courtesy of our hosts. If you have any special dietary requirements please let us know via the event chat.

If you would need assistance to leave the building in the event of an evacuation then please let us know via the event chat.

Note for recruitment professionals - we don't exclude recruiters from our meetings but we would ask you to contact Rick Garner for a brief chat before you start attending.

Schedule
Doors open from 18:00
Intro and welcome 18:40
Speaker 18:50 (with a break at some point )
Wrap-up & prize raffle 20.45
Close ~21:00
(Don't feel bad if you have to leave early for a train/bus/lift home - no one will be offended)

We then adjourn to a local bar for a drink and a natter - everyone is welcome to join us!

We’re back in November for another evening of Azure, AI, cloud engineering and plenty of real-world lessons from people actually building this stuff.

This month we’ve got two very different sessions covering some increasingly important challenges: how much AI agents really cost once you move beyond the demo, and how to build secure multi-tenant Kubernetes platforms without spinning up a cluster for every customer.

Session 1: Dieter Gobeyn - What does an agent actually cost? Designing for token economics before you ship
AI agent demos are everywhere, but there’s one question that often gets skipped: what does an agent actually cost to run?
Unlike a traditional REST call, the cost of an agent can vary depending on reasoning depth, tool calls, retries and how much context it carries around.

Dieter will dig into what you’re really paying for when building agents in Microsoft Foundry, explore architectural approaches for keeping spend under control, and importantly, look at when not to build an agent at all.

Session 2: Jaseetha Satkurunathan - Multi-Tenant Kubernetes: Isolating Customers on a Shared Cluster
A Kubernetes cluster for every customer gives you isolation, but it can also mean more infrastructure, more cost and more operational overhead.
So what happens when you want multiple customers to safely share the same underlying Kubernetes platform?

Jaseetha will explore a practical approach to designing a multi-tenant Kubernetes environment, looking at how customer workloads can remain isolated while avoiding unnecessary duplication of infrastructure.
This session is aimed at cloud, DevOps, platform and Kubernetes engineers thinking about multi-tenancy or looking for more efficient ways to host customer workloads.

Meetup location what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards

Agenda:
6:00 - 6:30 - Welcome & networking
6:30 - 7:15 - Foundry IQ and the Journey to Agentic Search
7:15 - 7:45 - Food, drinks and general chatter
7:45 - 8:30 - Stop building data lakes for AI. Build a context lake instead.

Location Details
what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards
Address: 18 Lower Byrom St, Manchester M3 4AP.
Morson Edge are based in a renovated space called the Bonded Warehouse which sits on the same site as the Old-Granada studio tour.
The entrance to the bonded warehouse can be reached from Lower Byrom street just next to the Museum of Science and Industry, the building entrance is on the right hand side across from the crystal maze. Google and apple maps may attempt to direct you to the rear of the building, if in doubt use the what3words location and look for the Crystal Maze too.

what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards