From Code to Scale: Open Source in Action

We had the pleasure of recently co-hosting an exciting evening at Foo Café in Malmö with our friends at Aiven — bringing together local developers, data engineers, and cloud professionals for a hands-on exploration of cloud-native infrastructure and real-time data systems.

Thanks to everyone who joined us! The room was full of great energy, thoughtful questions, and lively discussion — and we’re already looking forward to continuing these conversations in more cities across Europe.

If you couldn’t make it (or just want to revisit the key insights), here’s a deeper dive into the two talks that sparked the evening’s curiosity and conversation.

Pulumi in Practice: Infrastructure as Code for Kubernetes and Databases

The first session explored how Pulumi, a modern infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform, is changing the game for managing Kubernetes environments and cloud databases.

Rather than relying on traditional YAML-heavy workflows or separate provisioning tools, Pulumi allows teams to define and manage their infrastructure using familiar programming languages like TypeScript, Python, or Go. This makes it easier to:

• Bridge dev and ops with code-driven infrastructure definitions that live alongside your application code
• Improve security and maintainability by applying software engineering best practices (like versioning, testing, and CI/CD) to your infrastructure
• Simplify complex orchestration of resources across providers — in this case, using Pulumi to deploy Kubernetes clusters and provision managed databases like PostgreSQL or Redis from Aiven

Attendees saw a live example of how to declaratively spin up a production-ready environment, highlighting how Pulumi helps reduce drift, ensure repeatability, and accelerate time to deploy — especially in multi-cloud or hybrid setups.

If you want to explore by yourself what was done on the demo just take a look at: https://github.com/UpCloudLtd/pulumi-upcloud/tree/main/examples/db%2Bk8s

• It is all Open Source so feel free to fork or create a pull request. 

Streaming at Scale: Change Data Capture & Apache Kafka in the EU Cloud

Next, we took a closer look at real-time data streaming in a European context, with a talk focused on using Change Data Capture (CDC) and Apache Kafka to build event-driven architectures in the cloud.

Here’s what we unpacked:

• CDC is a powerful pattern that allows applications to react to database changes in real time by capturing inserts, updates, and deletes as events. Tools like Debezium can stream these changes from PostgreSQL into Kafka topics — no code changes required.
• Apache Kafka, as the backbone of modern stream processing, enables scalable, fault-tolerant pipelines for analytics, alerting, and microservices communication.
• The conversation also touched on data residency, sovereignty, and compliance, with emphasis on running these solutions within EU-based cloud infrastructure like UpCloud and Aiven. That means developers can build real-time systems that stay performant and GDPR-aligned.

This session gave attendees practical insights into how teams can modernize data workflows — enabling near-instant syncs between systems, more responsive applications, and architecture that scales with demand.

1. If you want to get started, explore over here:
   • https://github.com/troysellers/end-to-end-cdc-aiven
2. And connect that to your infrastructure at UpCloud using
   • https://aiven.io/docs/platform/howto/vpc-peering-upcloud

What’s Next?

We’re thrilled by the turnout and the thoughtful conversations that followed both talks — from dev teams looking to simplify ops, to engineers exploring new ways to scale data workflows without sacrificing control or compliance.

This Malmö stop was just the beginning. We’ll be hitting more cities soon, so stay tuned for announcements if you’d like to catch the next round live.

Until then, thank you again to everyone who joined us at Foo Café — and if you want to learn more about our work with Aiven, check out the case study here.

To get started check out our free seven day UpCloud trial and get started on Aiven!

Open source icons created by syafii5758 – Flaticon