Sydney User Group – July 29 2026
Welcome to the very first Sydney OpenSearch User Group meetup! We’re kicking off the Sydney chapter with talks, networking, pizza, and a quiz with swag to give away. Whether you’re deep into OpenSearch or just curious, come along and meet the community. Agenda and talk summaries below.
Agenda Wednesday, 29 July 2026 | 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
5:00 PM – 5:30 PM: Arrivals, Networking, Pizza & Drinks
5:30 PM – 5:35 PM: Welcome & Housekeeping
5:35 PM – 6:00 PM: Talk 1 – Urmila Iyer, AWS
6:00 PM – 6:20 PM: Talk 2 – Mehri Sandoghchian, Atlassian
6:20 PM – 6:40 PM: Talk 3 – Ryan Eves, Atlassian
6:40 PM – 6:50 PM: Tech Quiz – put your brain to the test to win swag
6:50 PM – 7:00 PM: Wrap-up & Networking
Talk 1: Observability with OpenSearch
Speaker: Urmila Iyer, OpenSearch Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS
Observability is more critical than ever as systems grow more distributed and complex. Urmila opens with a quick look at where the observability space is heading and why it matters, then digs into a hybrid approach with OpenSearch: OpenSearch for traces and logs, Prometheus for metrics, Data Prepper for ingestion, and OpenSearch Dashboards bringing it all together into a single pane of glass.
Talk 2: Autoscaling OpenSearch on Kubernetes
Speaker: Mehri Sandoghchian, Senior Software Engineer, Atlassian
Learn how Atlassian right-sizes hundreds of OpenSearch clusters at scale – a reactive layer in the Kubernetes operator for fast, low-risk changes, paired with a Recommendation Engine for capacity planning.
Talk 3: Architecting Blue/Green Deployments for OpenSearch on Kubernetes
Speaker: Ryan Eves, Senior Software Engineer, Atlassian
Learn about the Opensearch cluster update process, and how Atlassian designed its own blue/green deployment process to safely and reliably apply updates with no downtime.
