Advanced RAG Architecture and FinOps Optimisation

Kia ora,
We're thrilled to announce the 1st event from AWS Cloud Club for our students in the Auckland community in 2025! Whether you're a seasoned cloud practitioner or new to the field, we welcome you all to join us for an evening of connection with fellow AWS enthusiasts, insightful talks, and, of course, delicious pizza and drinks.

PLEASE BRING YOUR ID!!!

Event Details:
Date and Time: June 9, 2025, at 5:30 pm
Location: AWS Auckland Office (Level 13, Commercial Bay, 15 Customs Street West, Auckland)

How to Find Us: Enter the PWC building through the main entrance at Customs Street.
Go up by the escalators until the end, landing at the Spectra cafe and PWC reception on the right. Take the lift to level 13.

Agenda:
17:30 - 18:00: Networking
18:00 - 18:05: Introductions
18:05 - 18:45: Advanced RAG architectures to optimize LLM outputs - Trevor Kennedy
18:45 - 18:50: Q&A
18:50 - 18:55: Break
19:00 - 19:20: Optimize FinOps via Cost Intelligence Dashboards - Kobe Xu
19:20 - 19: 25: Q&A
19:30: Finish

Speakers:

Trevor Kennedy
Principal Cloud Architect - Leading Ai/ML Technical Initiatives for NZ Commercial @AWS

This talk explores advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures to combat hallucinations and achieve "ground truth" in LLM outputs. We'll examine the RAG ingestion pipeline, covering diverse chunking strategies (e.g., semantic, recursive) and their impact on context. We then differentiate Vector Databases, leveraging semantic similarity, from GraphRAG, which utilizes knowledge graphs for deeper relational understanding. The session will also highlight various ranking strategies (e.g., re-ranking, hybrid search) and other advanced techniques like query rewriting, all aimed at optimizing retrieved context. The key advantages of these strategies include enhanced factual accuracy, improved domain-specific knowledge handling, and greater interpretability and transparency in LLM responses.

Kobe Xu
Senior Consultant, Cloud Architect @Deloitte

FinOps has becoming a popular in recent years and there are tools available to help you understand your cost and more!
The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards is an open-source framework, lovingly cultivated and maintained by a group of customer-obsessed AWSers, that provides customers actionable insights and optimization opportunities at scale of organization. Supported by the Well-Architected framework, the dashboards can be deployed by any customer using a CloudFormation template or a command-line tool in their environment. These dashboards help customers drive financial accountability, optimize cost, track usage goals, implement best-practices for governance, and achieve operational excellence across all Well Architected pillars.

Shout-Out:
A special thanks to our sponsors, AWS and AWS User Group, for their support. Discover more about them and other AWS clubs in Auckland:
AWS User Group: https://awsug.nz/
AWS Tools and Programming Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/auckland-aws-tools-meetup/
Auckland AWS Community Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/aws_nz/

Code of Conduct
AWS Cloud Club at Auckland is committed to providing a friendly and welcoming space for everyone who attends our meetup events, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices. Any form of harassment, racism, misogyny, or xenophobia is unacceptable. Participants violating these rules will be invited to leave the meeting.
We look forward to seeing you all!
Feel free to join us on our New Slack channel: https://join.slack.com/t/awsusergroup-nz/shared_invite/zt-2dl84adxe-ECk4zxv8Vcm2b_wcVsScJg
PLEASE NOTE!!!
By RSVP this event, you will automatically be considered that you understand this is a student lead meet up group for students and have read and agree on the code of conduct https://aws.amazon.com/codeofconduct/