DevOps Exchange Manchester - Booking.com, DeepL, Sudoblark, BBC

Thanks to everyone who stopped by for our first DevOps Exchange Manchester event of 2025, which was hosted within the incredible DTX Manchester Conference.

This is the 2nd year in a row that we have been invited back to this conference (which remains the North’s leading event for digital and IT professionals) and it did not dissapoint!

The DevOps Exchange Meetup took place on the 'Dev Excellence & Engineering Stage' on day 2 of the conference, where we welcomed to the stage; Booking.com, DeepL, Sudoblark and BBC.

First up, we welcomed to the stage Lee Jarvis & Abhin Xaver from Booking.com who discussed how their organisation tackles operational and cultural FinOps challenges. Their talk covered Booking.com's FinOps journey through the lens of "Crawl, Walk, Run" stages and the FinOps phases of Inform, Optimise, and Operate.

They shared how they established a FinOps operating model in 2022 to manage their growing public cloud costs, implemented cost attribution and reporting solutions, built notification systems with AI assistance, created an optimisation framework that increased savings, and developed training programs to drive cultural adoption.



The presentation highlighted their impressive results, including a 46% increase in cost ownership, 94% reduction in projects without budgets, and forecast variance reduction from 30% to just 1%.

To view the slides from this talk, click here.

Next up on stage we welcomed Akash Joshi from DeepL, who presented on transforming a script into a command line interface (CLI) using Golang. His presentation walked through the journey of turning OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool into a user- riendly CLI application.

Akash explained why he chose Golang for this project (citing its binary first nature, cross OS compatibility, and type safety), demonstrated essential Golang commands, and showed the process of setting up a project structure.


He then covered how to release and distribute the application through Goreleaser and Homebrew, including configuring GitHub Actions for automated releases. The presentation provided a practical roadmap for developers looking to build and distribute their own CLI tools.

To view the slides from this talk, click here.

Benjamin Clark, DevOps Engineer at Sudoblark then focused on transforming the traditional approach of using Terraform for infrastructure as code into a more user friendly and efficient paradigm. Benjamin highlighted common pain points within classic Terraform practices, such as closely coupled application and infrastructure code, inflexible development processes, and the overwhelming complexity that leads to what he describes as “spaghetti code.”



The new method aims to enhance collaboration between application and infrastructure teams through reusable components and a single source of truth for resources, ultimately simplifying the development workflow to increase the release tempo dramatically. The talk shared his experiences from working with clients to realise these benefits, including demonstrating practical coding strategies and modular Terraform implementation within various development contexts.

Last, but certainly not least we welcomed to the stage Aramide Shobande from BBC who joined us to explore AI Driven DevOps and predictive security approaches. His presentation contrasted traditional DevOps (with manual resource creation and error prone setups) against modern practices using CDK and Terraform for infrastructure as code.

Aramide demonstrated how AI integration enables real time threat detection and response, showing examples of classifying API behavior and attacks using AWS SageMaker to categorise traffic patterns. A key innovation he highlighted was implementing Human in the Loop (HITL) systems through Slack notifications for high risk security incidents. The presentation illustrated how this approach benefits both service availability through proactive protection and engineering teams by reducing manual investigation time.



Aramide concluded by highlighting how the combination of DevOps, AI, and Infrastructure as Code creates context aware systems with automated responses while still keeping humans involved in critical decisions.

To view the slides from this talk, click here.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this event, and again to DTX for allowing us to host this event within your conference. We will be back at DTX (hopefully) in 2026! 

Please ensure that you are subscribed to our Meetup page to avoid future event announcements. 

We look forward to seeing you all at our next event!