7 March 2019 Meetup

We are excited to announce our relaunch!

Our first meetup for 2019 is going to take place in the meeting space on the third floor of Apsley House in Leeds.

• 6:30: Doors, chance to mingle.
• 7:15: Group news, updates and announcements
• 7:25: Combating Fraud and Providing Customer Insights In Real Time: A journey from Big Iron to AWS
• 8:05: Break
• 8:20: Cost Optimisation on AWS
• 9:00: Social

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Combating Fraud and Providing Customer Insights In Real Time - Matt Houghton, CDL

Learn how CDL, a software provider for the retail insurance sector, processes vast amounts of consumer data in milliseconds using machine learning, AI and big data in order to help the UK's biggest insurance providers combat fraud, learn consumer habits, and more.

The talk will cover how we tried and failed to build a solution, called Hummingbird, with ‘big iron’ before moving to the cloud with AWS. We developed and delivered at scale in under 8 months. We will demo how Hummingbird works in production and how our DevOps team uses key AWS Services, logging, monitoring and machine learning to continually improve and deliver enhancements to the service.

We will share our experience and lessons learnt from completing an AWS Well-Architected Review and applying Chaos Engineering disciplines through Game Days. Technologies discussed include packer, terraform, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, lambdas and containers.

Matt is a Technical Consultant at CDL. Their customer base comprises high volume retail operations or start-ups with serious growth ambitions, including over 100 Internet brands and all the major price comparison sites, and they also have partnerships with over 50 UK insurers. https://www.cdl.co.uk/

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Cost Optimisation on AWS - Ian Harris, BJSS

Join us for a deep dive into the challenging and often eccentric world of cost management on AWS.

In this session we'll look at the cost optimisation opportunities that lie at each stage of Cloud Adoption. We'll look at the options and pitfalls during early adoption, the migration of on premise solutions and greenfield projects in the cloud which can leverage the unique native capabilities of AWS.

We will also cover the differing concerns between Dev and Production and why your approach to cost management may need to vary while still allowing you to deliver consistent environments. This includes the various purchasing options for services like EC2 and RDS.

We will explore the native tools available to you for cost management including Billing reports, Trusted Advisor and Cost Explorer, we'll look at what these tools can bring to the cost saving party.

Finally we will look at some of the architectural approaches we can take to control costs. We'll also take a special look at how CloudWatch Logs Insights can be used to lower the costs of querying your logs in some use cases.

Ian is a Cloud Consultant at BJSS currently working as the Platform Solutions Architect on a large scale public sector AWS deployment.

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Refreshments

We’ll be providing a range of refreshments at the venue, from Infinity Works (https://www.infinityworks.com/), our sponsors for this event.

Code of conduct

Like a large number of other communities, we have an anti harassment policy and code of conduct (https://www.meetup.com/AWS-Leeds-User-Group/pages/28419639/Code_of_Conduct/), in order to support the inclusive nature of our events. It is necessary for all attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at any AWS Leeds to agree with the code of conduct.

Helping with diversity and inclusivity

The organising team for AWS Leeds are keen to promote diversity and inclusivity, in terms of speakers, how events are run and even potentially the composition of the organising team. If you would like to contribute to this aim, particularly if you think you have experiences that you might not consider to be typical for the majority of the tech community, we would be really excited to talk with you at the event.