February Edition, Sydney Data Engineering meetup

MSFT Reactor have kindly invited us to their Wynyard park offices!

🏠Host: MSFT Reactor
🍕Food and Drink: MSFT Reactor

Speakers:
🎤 Charles Verdon, Data Innovation Strategist – Asia, Microsoft
Evolution of Big Data: Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics
During this session, we will showcase how Big Data and Data Warehouse are transforming to meet the evolving needs of data engineers and data scientists. Out of the disparate toolsets of the 2010s, we soon will see the introduction of end-to-end analytics technologies that will simplify and accelerate your 2020s projects. The announcement of Azure Synapse Analytics at the Microsoft Ignite conference in November 2019 marks the beginning of this new technological wave. This talk will answer the following questions:

• Introduction to Synapse Analytics: what and why
• What can be done right now: Synapse-ready architecture
• Synapse Analytics technical brief and Q&A
  Charles Verdon (@chverdon) is a McGill MBA alum (2013), undergrad at Montreal Polytechnique in software engineering (2006). After his MBA, he joined Microsoft Canada’s sales team for data platform, business intelligence and analytics products. After 5 years, Charles moved to Singapore for the Asia regional role of Data Innovation Strategist focused on modernizing big data and data warehouse environments to help customers maximize value out of their data estates. Charles has experience in the Transport, Retail and Banking industries and he’s passionate about analytics, activating a data-driven culture and by interactive data visualization.

🎤 Boris Kravtsov - Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft
End-to-end machine learning with Azure ML and Automated ML
The talk is focused on machine learning services in Azure and will be helpful to those looking to get an update on current capabilities in the cloud, data engineers, developers and data scientists. We will cover the process, powerful tools for all levels of experience and spend some time discussing the emerging field of automated machine learning.
Boris helps others build competitive differentiation by using data and latest cloud technologies. Over the last couple of years he worked with dozens of companies to kick-off their advanced analytics capability in Azure. Boris is passionate about tech startups and happy to get involved as an advisor.

🎤 Tatiana Ermolaeva, founder, aspect.dev
Faster build & test cycles: Building & deploying SKACK-stack data pipelines with Bazel
We’ll present an overview of the many ways that Bazel, an open-source build tool, can boost your engineering productivity and reduce your CI build & test times by an order of magnitude. As an example, we’ll explore the performance optimization opportunities of the builds constituting a typical SKACK-stack(Spark/Kubernetes/Akka/Cassandra/Kafka) pipeline; We’ll analyze some benchmarks and talk through mechanics of observed improvements.
Backend engineer by background, I am currently focusing on implementing the tools for developer productivity: CI/CD pipelines streamlining, remote caching, remote build execution.

Remember to bring along some great questions!