Yorkshire Azure User Group summer social and panel

Yorkshire Azure User Group, Yorkshire DevOps and AWS Leeds are joining forces for a summer social and panel evening at The Brew Society on Aire Street. The event also marks the Yorkshire Azure User Group's 4th birthday. Seven named panellists will discuss the communities themselves — how they've grown, what they do, and where they're headed — making this as much a conversation about the Leeds tech community as a celebration of it.

The format is a social with a panel discussion running alongside it. Doors open at 6:00 PM and the event runs until 8:00 PM. With 49 attendees already signed up across two groups, it's a mid-sized evening: big enough to be worth attending, small enough to have a proper conversation. The audience will be a mix of engineers, architects, cloud practitioners and community regulars from across Leeds.

Yorkshire DevOps is one of the longer-running practitioner communities in the city, organising regular meetups covering DevOps, cloud and platform engineering topics. Yorkshire Azure User Group focuses on Microsoft Azure practitioners in the region. AWS Leeds covers the Amazon Web Services side of the cloud ecosystem. All three communities have been active through 2025 and into 2026. Hippo Digital is the venue partner for this event, with platinum sponsorship from Ada Meher and Digital Endeavours, and event partnerships from CGI and the Financial Conduct Authority.

The Brew Society at 26 Aire Street, LS1 4HT is a city-centre venue well-suited to this kind of informal professional gathering — accessible from Leeds station in under ten minutes on foot.

Why attend

Seven practitioners from Microsoft, CGI, Accenture, CO-OP and independent backgrounds are on the panel. That's a decent cross-section of how cloud and DevOps work looks in 2026, from junior automation engineering through to group data engineering and cloud architecture. You'll hear from people doing the work, not selling it.

Beyond the panel, this is a genuine cross-community social. If you've been meaning to get more involved with any of the three groups — or you're new to the Leeds tech scene — this is a low-pressure way to meet regulars from all three at once.

Agenda

• 18:00 — Doors open, networking begins
• Panel discussion: Communities across Leeds (time within the session not specified)
• 20:00 — Event closes

Yorkshire Azure User Group 4th Birthday celebration runs throughout the evening.

Speakers

• Ethan Sumner — Co-Founder & CEO, Community Stack
• Jared Holgate — Senior Software Engineer, Software Deployments, Microsoft
• Suzie Rasneek — Junior Automation Engineer, Independent
• Grace O'Halloran — Group Data Engineering Lead, CO-OP
• Sofia Trevino — Cloud Solutions Architect, Microsoft
• Edmund Craske — Senior Business Consultant, Technical Advisory, CGI
• Edward Richardson-Lee — Full Stack Engineering Specialist, Accenture