Hi folks!

Welcome to our March meetup, join us to hear three fantastic speakers and network on Rambly with your fellow techies!

6:45 Kick off
7:15 Building Hopsworks, a cloud-native managed feature store for machine learning (Jim Dowling, Logical Clocks)
7:45 BDD + Modules = Your Best DevSecOps Life (Josh Armitag, Contino)
8:15 Break
8:30 Lay3r C8ke - Deterministic Security (Steve Giguere, StackRox)
9:00 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Building Hopsworks, a cloud-native managed feature store for machine learning (Jim Dowling, Logical Clocks)
In this talk, we describe how we built a cloud-native Feature Store for machine learning (ML) around dataframes and Apache Spark. We will demonstrate how our open-source platform, Hopsworks, seamlessly integrates with Spark-based and Python platforms. With the Feature Store, we'll demonstrate how data engineers can transform and engineers features from backend databases and data lakes, while data scientists can use Python or Spark to select and transform features into train/test data in a file format of choice (.tfrecords, .npy, .petastorm, etc) on a file system of choice (S3, HDFS). Finally, we'll show how the Feature Store enables end-to-end ML pipelines to be factored into feature engineering and data science stages that each can run at different cadences.

Jim Dowling is CEO of Logical Clocks and an Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He's lead architect of the open-source Hopsworks platform, a horizontally scalable data platform for machine learning that includes the industry’s first Feature Store. He's on Twitter @jim_dowling

BDD + Modules = Your Best DevSecOps Life (Josh Armitag, Contino)
We’ll go through how using terraform-compliance and BDD allows you to create an executable specification that can be understood, automated and used to drive change across your organisation. We’ll also go through principles for enterprise-scale module design, and how these fundamental building blocks make shift-left security a reality and transform security at even the biggest and oldest of companies. You’ll take away an appreciation for how BDD drives communication, understanding and alignment, and how principled module design can drive positive behaviours and outcomes for minimal effort.

Josh works as a consultant after spending time with everything from mainframes to machine learning and kubernetes. Having split half his life in the UK, half in Australia, he’s now back in London helping regulated enterprises embrace lean software development, cloud native architectures and team happiness as a true north metric.

Lay3r C8ke - Deterministic Security (Steve Giguere, StackRox)
Kubernetes has not only brought us the ability, but also the expectation of defining "desired state" as code. This has already given birth and strength to movements like GitOps as we move towards the nirvana of "everything as code". But does this apply to security? In spite of security's attempts at hanging with the cool kids with forced parlance like devsecops and shift-left, this same change which is enabling the better, faster and stronger of DevOps can also bring a secure by default definition of "harder". Security used to be more about probability. Within the desired state, can reside desired security. With each layer and stage we add through our pipeline from Terraform to Yaml, with the help of kubernetes not only can we define what secure is, but even maintain it.

Steve has spent time in the aero, telecom and automotive industries. With over 25 years in software development, he's now a DevSecOps community champion, securing cloud native applications, currently with kubernetes security company StackRox. Before that he was at Aqua Security and application security specialists Synopsys as a Lead Solution Architect. Check out his podcast, CoSeCast (https://cosecast.com) and Twitter: @SteveGiguere