AI Agents in Production with Kubernetes

Welcome to our 2nd Liverpool meetup of 2026, hosted and sponsored by The Very Group in Speke! Details below: Location: Skyways House, Speke Rd, Speke, Liverpool, L70 1AB. Time: Doors open at 6PM Drinks, Pizza, talks, and networking. We're excited to invite you to our 8th DevOps Society Meetup of 2026, proudly hosted and sponsored by The Very Group. This event has two technical talks, which can be a fit for anybody. There will be some really technical bits in both talks, but also some high-level bits too, with three really exciting speakers lined up for this one in Ryan, Sean and Richard. Format of the Meetup: 6:00pm – 6:30pm — Networking on arrival, with food and drinks provided by The Very Group. 6:30pm – 7:10pm — First speaker + Q&A 7:10pm – 7:20pm — Break for refreshments and networking 7:20pm – 8:00pm — Second speaker + Q&A 8:00pm onwards — More networking at the venue, then at a nearby pub. Timings can vary slightly depending on Q&A. SPEAKER 1 - Ryan Healey - Principal Platform Engineer @ The Very Group Bio: Ryan Healey is a Principal Platform Engineer working at The Very Group, a UK-based digital retailer. Ryan helps deliver platforms and tooling for internal software engineering teams to accelerate developing and deploying software. Since joining Very in 2021, Ryan has been embedded within multiple engineering squads, covering observability, production support, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and most recently AI Platforms. Talk Title: Helping engineers go faster: developing an agentic AI pattern for The Very Group Description: Our journey of adopting agentic AI to help our software engineering teams deliver value to families. SPEAKER 2 - Sean Clerkin - Senior Solutions Architect @ AWS\, and Richard Orrick - Senior Technical Account Manager @ AWS Bios: Sean Clerkin is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. Sean has been with AWS for 6 years and works with Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods customers in the UK. Richard Orrick is a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS. Richard has also been with AWS for 6 years and works with Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods customers in the UK. Talk title: From prompt to pod: AI-assisted Kubernetes operations on AWS Description: AI-assisted operations are evolving quickly, offering platform teams new ways to understand, operate, and troubleshoot Kubernetes environments. In this session, explore two complementary approaches: interactive assistants that use Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations to work alongside engineers, and more autonomous agents that can support incident investigation. Through live demonstrations using the latest capabilities available at the time, see how tools such as AWS MCP Server and AWS DevOps Agent can help teams operate and troubleshoot Amazon EKS using natural language. Explore how these approaches can shorten the path from symptom to root cause and help reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). Learn where they fit, how they complement existing operational practices, and which permissions and human guardrails matter. Leave with practical patterns for evaluating this rapidly developing space and safely introducing AI-assisted operations into your Kubernetes platform. Please register now to book your spot! Location - Skyways House, Speke Rd, Speke, Liverpool, L70 1AB.