Chicago Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup - Aug 2023

• Are you interested in learning more about open-source data technologies? ✅
• Do you want to network with local and international tech professionals in a fun, relaxed environment? ✅

Then come join us on Wednesday, August 9th at Discover, for an evening full of inspiring conversations and exciting talks.

Reserve your seat now for this free and exciting meetup!
Fill out this the access list form for the event!

Venue: Discover Financial (350 West Wolf Point Plaza)

Program:
18:30 - 19:00 - Welcome + networking
19:00 - 19:20 - Back to the future. "Batch job... you still there?" - Ehfaj Khan
19:20 - 19:50 - Codify your data infrastructure using Terraform - Dewan Ahmed
19:50 - 20:30 - Food* and networking

* Please note that this is an alcohol-free event. Light bites will be provided.
* By attending this event, you agree to abide by our community code of conduct.

Speaker # 1 Ehfaj Khan

Ehfaj Khan is an Expert Application Engineer at Discover Financial Services (DFS). He has strong experience building large-scale, highly available event-oriented architectures and cloud-native application modernizations.

Talk # 1 Back to the future. "Batch job... you still there?"

Over time, due to application modernization and digital transformation, business demands are growing at light speed (it is some way) and most data processing cannot wait for a “batch” to be triggered and provide a result once or twice in a day or at night. People are looking for the data now with an instant response.

On the other hand, business data has grown so much that batch jobs just can’t process the data fast enough.

In this talk we will cover how business processes can be setup as an event-driven approach v/s batch, which is near real-time, resilient, low latency, high throughput with a more futuristic visibility.

Speaker # 2 Dewan Ahmed

Dewan Ahmed is a Senior Developer Advocate at Aiven, a company that offers a fully managed, open-source cloud data platform. Before joining Aiven, he worked at IBM and Red Hat as a developer, QA lead, consultant, and developer advocate.

For the last nine years, Dewan has worked to solve DevOps and infrastructure problems for small startups, large enterprises, and governments. Starting his public speaking at a toastmaster in 2016, he has been speaking at tech conferences and meetups for the last six years.

His work is fueled by a passion for open-source and a deep respect for the tech community.

Talk # 2 Codify your data infrastructure using Terraform

Are you terraforming or click-opsing your data infrastructure? From spinning up virtual machines to managing application infrastructure across cloud regions, infrastructure-as-code tools have been widely used and adopted. Are you treating your data infrastructure in a similar way or still using complex scripts to create and manage your data infrastructure?

Terraform, an open-source infrastructure as code tool by HashiCorp, can be used to provision data infrastructure across multiple clouds. In this talk, I will discuss the need for an infrastructure-as-code approach for databases and streaming platforms. A large portion of the talk will consist of a demo that walks the audience through creating multiple data services using Terraform for a real use case. The demo will show the benefits of using such a tool over creating these services manually.

By attending the talk, the audience will understand the benefits of codifying the data infrastructure and walk away with the resources to be able to try Terraform out for their own data infrastructure.