The Top 11 DevOps Events in Stockholm in 2020

Stockholm is one of the epicenters of European innovation. Unbeknownst to many, it anchors a vibrant startup ecosystem in the Nordics, where developers from across Scandinavia and the Baltics work and partner. Major local brands like Klarna and iZettle have Stockholm—and Sweden as a whole—on the map. It’s attracted other big players like Microsoft and Google, keeping the city vibrant for developers. As a result, there are a number of general and topic-specific meetups in Stockholm covering the latest trends and most popular platforms in DevOps. The following is a list of just 11 of those events, including their most common meeting areas, the names of their meetup organizers, and how big each community is.

1. Stockholm Kubernetes and Cloud Native Computing

Stockholm Kubernetes and Cloud Native Computing meetup (Meetup.com)

Organizers: Dave Zolotusky, Andreas Holmsten, Viktor Ekmark, Ilia Mikhailov, Matthias Grüter
Members: 88
Past Event Locations: 7A Centralen, WeWork on Regeringsgatan 29

This is one of the bigger shows on the DevOps meetup scene in Sweden. Its obvious focus on Kubernetes also makes it an epicenter of networking for local startups and career-builders. Recent events have covered chaos engineering, K8s security, and Istio. They also have a Slack community.

2. OpenInfra User Group Sweden

Organizers: Nicolae Paladi, Stefano Cucchiella, Peter Lunderbye, Daniel Byström, and three others
Members: 675
Past Event Locations: Münchenbryggeriet, Gallerian, WeWork

OpenStack’s official meetup in the area, the group covers infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud virtualization among other topics. Their recent meetups have covered OpenStack compliance and using non-cloud Kubernetes. Late in 2019, their annual  conference OpenInfra Days—Nordics covered Kubernetes and OpenCompute.

3. Openshift Sweden

This is one of OpenShift’s 29 official meetups and is the official one for Sweden. They meet on a near-quarterly basis. Sponsors tend to host the meetup, but the last one was at the Convendum Coworking Space. The winter meetup in February 2020 focused on scaling and accelerating apps in Red Hat OpenShift.

Organizers: Mattias Paulsson, Johannes Brännström, Martin Östmark
Members: 420
Past Event Locations: Covendum Coworking Space, Forefront Consulting Group

4. Agile People Stockholm

Agile People Stockholm is one of the more philosophical meetups, talking about and playing with different ideas for making production and organizations more efficient. This obviously includes the application of agile methodology, but can also cover other techniques either that are established or newer. Recent events have covered the core quadrant model and using Wardley maps to coordinate production. They meet every 1-2 weeks.

Organizers: The AgilePeople group and 17 others
Members: 1,550
Past Event Locations: Ekskäret Klustret, Crisp AB Consultancy

5. FOSS Sthlm

This meetup is aimed at free and open-source software. Their meetings have been in several locations and have covered topics like running Linux kernel file systems, using open source code from national Swedish Television, and using the Janus WebRTC server.

Organizers: Claes Jakobsson, Daniel Stenberg
Members: 640
Past Event Locations: Swedish Television (SVT), Afry Engineering

6. Stockholm AWS Meetup

The event typically highlights AWS use cases with different companies, who might sponsor individual events (such as big names like Cybercom, iZettle or Klarna). Recent hot topics from speakers—covered in January 2020’s Nordic Community Day—included serverless and multi-environment architectures, as well as workshops on DynamoDB, Alexa, and Terraform AWS modules.

Organizers: Rolf Koski, Gunnar Grosch, Ierra, and Rickard von Essen
Members: 2,044
Past Event Locations: Nalen event hall, R2M, WeWork on Regeringsgatan 29

7. DevOps Stockholm

DevOps Stockholm sponsors the local edition of Devopsdays, as well as bimonthly meetings. The most recent events covered Jenkins pipeline testing and chaos engineering.

Organizers: Tony Collander, Matthias Grüter, and Jessica Brown
Members: 2,800
Past Event Locations: 7A Odenplan, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and iZettle

8. Stockholm Cassandra Users

This meetup appears to be resurrecting itself after a long hiatus. Managed by Datastax, proponents of the nosql database Cassandra, the meetup takes place on a roughly quarterly basis. It covers integration with other Apache tools like Spark, as well as tools like GraphDB. Topics range from Cassandra cluster management in the cloud to database exports.

Organizers: Datastax, Cedrick Lunven, and Radovan Zvoncek
Members: 560
Past Event Locations: Spotify, Google Stockholm

9. Swedish Microsoft ALM and DevOps Meetup

Microsoft’s default official meetup for Swedish DevOps, it meets on a monthly basis and covers the most pertinent topics in the field. It has a heavy focus on Azure, obviously, and recently used one session to cover YAML pipelines and branching policies. Other recent events include automating workflows in GitHub and mission-critical apps over Azure.

Organizers: Magnus Timner, Staffan Blomgren, Taavi Kõosaar, Jakob Ehn, and Mathias Olausson
Members: 808
Past Event Locations: Covendum Coworking Space, WeWork, Hobo Hotel, R2M

10. Stockholm Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

This is everything Kafka, all the time. One of the most popular messaging queues in DevOps, integrations with the Kafka Connect API and using KSQL querying language are at the center of the group’s events. The meetup did not organize for most of 2019, but came roaring back with multiple shindigs in early 2020. Recent events have covered building Kafka streaming data pipelines, the use case of Swedbank, and deployment from the Confluent platform.

Organizers: Ale Murray and Alice Richardson
Members: 397
Past Event Locations: Swedbank, Radisson Blu

Expect us to update this list in the future as new events emerge.

11. Stockholm FullStack SecDevOps Engineering Meetup

This is meant to be the main security+DevOps meetup in Sweden. After a bit of a hiatus, 2020 is scheduled to have several events lined up with a growing focus on Kubernetes integrations. Recent events include two Kubernetes boot campus, as well as some attention to Kafka, GitHub as Code, and Kubernetes Ingresses.

Organizers: Fatima Farrukh, Saleha Mansoor Amir, and Stakater CEO Rasheed Amir
Members: 1,270
Past Event Locations: IBM, Forefront Consulting Group, Foo Café