Cheryl Hung

Cloud Native London October 2024: AWS, Mia-Platform, and TrueLayer


Three speakers from AWS, Mia-Platform, and TrueLayer joined us at the September Cloud Native London meetup at the Just Eat offices, as well as via the YouTube/Twitch livestreams.

We are immensely grateful to HAProxy for their generous support and sponsorship.

Overview

Kicking off our evening was Tolis Christomanos from AWS discussing how to Create more dynamic NPC experiences with generative AI(starting at 17:02). He talked about how:

  • Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that allows you to interact with multiple LLMs using one standardised API
  • Retrieval Augmented Generations can be used to add extra specialised knowledge your model
  • Fine tuning allows faster responses by paying the upfront price of training an LLM on specialised data

Next up we had Michel Murabito from Mia-Platform with his talk on How to build a Conversational DevX interface using RAG(starting at 47:44). His takeaways mentioned that:

  • Platform Engineering, increasingly popular today, can be enhanced by AI: Integrating artificial intelligence into Platform Engineering opens up new possibilities. For example, technologies like conversational AI and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) can make internal platforms more powerful and intuitive, allowing developers to access resources, information and environments more efficiently and through a self-service approach.
  • Integrating AI with techniques like RAG allows for real-time retrieval of updated information: RAG offers a significant advantage over traditional generative AI models. It allows for the integration of real-time, context-specific information directly into the platform, greatly enhancing the accuracy of responses and operational decisions. This is particularly useful in environments where data changes frequently, such as in application or operational management.
  • Using information from multiple sources improves Developer Experience, boosts productivity and resolves issues faster: By integrating not only documentation, but also application data, logs, errors and system information into the platform, it’s possible to enrich the developer’s experience. This reduces the need for manual intervention and allows for quicker problem resolution, increasing overall productivity. The result is a smarter platform that assists developers with precise and contextualized answers, reducing downtime and enhancing efficiency.

And wrapping up our evening was Surya Pandian from TrueLayer telling us about Migrating Kubernetes Cluster from one provider to another(starting at 1:35:28). Her takeaways are about:

  • While distributed systems and micro services have their winning points. It is easy to get into a mesh of micro services that are dependent on one another. Good practises like ensuring that a service can at the very least start without depending on other services would have helped in our migration hugely.
  • Cross team collaboration and people skills for the win. For the success of the migration, we had to work with every team in TrueLayer, make in house library changes across many languages etc… Always remember that we are building things by and for people <3
  • Surprisingly, finding fixes and having issues in open sourced tools are faster than paid tools. Contribute more, sponsor to more open source.

And of course, our usual group photo!

Cloud Native London November

Our next meetup will be on Wednesday 6th November, when we’ll be joined by speakers from Hitachi Vantara, LEGO Group, and iCloud! RSVP and save the date now!.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you in a month!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)