Cloud Native London July 2026: Luther Systems and Octopus Deploy
Two speakers from Luther Systems and Octopus joined us at the July Cloud Native London meetup at the Just Eat office, as well as via the YouTube/LinkedIn livestreams.
We are immensely grateful to Luther System, Octopus, Chronosphere, and TechShack for their generous support and sponsorship.
Overview
Kicking off our evening was Hossein Kakavand from Luther Systems discussing Architecting Safe Autonomy: High-Stakes Autonomous Agents Need Deterministic Checkpoints for Safety(starting at 8:39). His takeaways explained that:
- Give the agent freedom where it’s strong and a tight leash where it’s risky. Let it chat, question and explore with the user as much as it likes, that’s what LLMs are genuinely good at. Reserve hard rules and deterministic code for the high-stakes actions, like actually deploying infrastructure.
- InsideOut collaborates with you to shape a feature set, pick a stack, settle the config, generate the Terraform and produce cost estimates, then deploys the infrastructure and manages it in real time, handling monitoring, alerts and changes. The whole journey runs through deterministic checkpoints, so the agent stays autonomous where it adds value while every high-stakes step is validated before it lands.
- Make the worst mistakes impossible by design, not just discouraged. In InsideOut the agent can request a deploy by presenting a button, but it never holds the cloud account keys to run the deploy itself. You keep the Terraform it generates, with no lock-in. Safety lives in how the system is built, not in a politely worded instruction.
- Autonomous agents perform best when they’re free to explore, but that same freedom lets them drift. Milestone checkpoints, through deterministic artifact validation, strike the balance, keeping autonomy and performance while preserving safety.
And wrapping up our evening was Steve Fenton from Octopus describing Putting Open GitOps to the test(starting at 26:15). He described how:
- GitOps practices give an uplift to DevOps measures, throughput, stability, reliability, and wellbeing.
- There are five intended benefits of GitOps and you need all the practices to get all the benefits.
- Only 16% of organizations are doing “full GitOps”
And of course, our usual group photo!
Cloud Native London August
Our next meetup will be on Wednesday 5th August, when we’ll be joined by speakers from Teeming.ai, Chronosphere, and Dash0! RSVP and save the date now!.
I will be away for one more month, but Stephen Perera will host again. Stay safe, stay healthy, and soon!
Cheryl (@oicheryl)
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