Sessions

ALICE-MOORE

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 10:55 am

Level: Intermediate

The story of how G-P streamlined processes, untangled complex business logic, scaled for the global market, and significantly reduced run times—all while bringing the business along for the journey and gaining their trust.

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Alice Moore

Senior Software Engineer at G-P

ALLISON-RACHEL

How Arity has improved services using AWS products

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 10:55 am

Level: Introductory

We will discuss how our team have improved the services we provide within Arity by changing to use AWS products. Examples would be using firehose to stream data from msk to s3, as well as using EMR as a replacement for hadoop.

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Allison Johnston

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Arity

Rachel Smyth

Cloud Engineer at Arity

BEN-BRIDTS

The Hidden Costs of Managed Open Source

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 9:45 am

Level: Advanced

When building on AWS there are frequently multiple ways to achieve the same goal: You can run containers on ECS or EKS; you can use SQS or Amazon MQ; there’s MSK and Kinesis, … In this talk we will look at few different ways in which you might be paying more when selecting the (managed) Open Source Solution. From the expected higher base cost for a private control plane, to the more surprising costs that suddenly can appear in the EC2-Other category.

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Ben Bridts

AWS Community Hero and AWS Ambassador @ Cloudar

BRADLEY-MCCOURT

AWS Builder Cards: The Game-Changer for Learning AWS

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 12:30 pm

Level: Introductory

Discover how Hamilton Robson is gamifying junior developer cloud architecture training using AWS BuilderCards. This session will demonstrate how interactive games and mentorship may increase new hires confidence and understanding of AWS, facilitating their ability to support and comprehend technical decisions. Come experience a fun, interactive presentation of AWS BuilderCards in action.

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Bradley McCourt

Jr Software Engineer at Hamilton Robson

CLOSING-KEYNOTE

Navigating the WOW moments : A Career in Tech

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 4:20 pm

Unless you play World of Warcraft, a WoW moment in tech is when something new comes along that impacts your day to day way of working and you need to decide is it worthwhile embracing or safe to ignore. In this session, join Derek as we explore some of those wow moments that he has experienced over 30 years of tech, how he has navigated each and how he is thinking about the current one, GenAI and how to tell if its one to ignore or one to embrace.

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Derek Bingham

Developer Advocate @ AWS

EVE-BRENNAN

Navigating Post-BSL Terraform: OpenTofu and Beyond for AWS Users

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 10:10 am

Level: Advanced

In August 2023, HashiCorp’s controversial switch to the newly coined Business Source License (BSL) for Terraform ignited discussions in the AWS user community about the future of open source IaC software. This talk dives into the implications for those using Terraform to provision their AWS infrastructure and explores the most well known fork, OpenTofu. We’ll break down the BSL’s impact and take at the benefits and drawbacks of Terraform alternatives.

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Eve Brennan

Cloud Engineer III at Business Insider

GILLIAN-MCCANN

Search is Dead. Long Live Retrieval!?!

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 3:45 pm

Level: Advanced

RAG is all the rage.. LLM and vector DBs are going to answer all the questions.. right? Actually no, this talk will take a deeper look at the R aka Retrieval and the advanced Search techniques and new patterns needed to meet user expectations.

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Gillian McCann

Co-founder and CTO of Workgrid Software

JOHNNY-OKANE

Digital Contact Center - Enabling Better Customer Experience

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 12:30 pm

Level: Introductory

Migration to AWS for Digital Contact Center at Allstate

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Johnny O'Kane

Principal Platform Consultant

LEE-HANNIGAN

Deep Dive into Amazon DynamoDB using design puzzles

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 11:20 am

Level: Advanced

Dive deep into how Amazon DynamoDB works at scale by collaboratively solving a few design puzzles that may seem simple but are actually complex. By understanding how DynamoDB operates, learn how you can look beyond the obvious solution to find a more effective and scalable one.

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Lee Hannigan

Sr DynamoDB Specialist Solutions Architect

LUCIANO-MAMMINO

Faster/Greener/Cheaper Serverless compute with Lambda & Rust

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 3:10 pm

Level: Intermediate

Rust is taking the software engineering world by storm, but how does it affect serverless? In AWS it’s not even a supported runtime, so how can we even use it… and should we even try to do that? Spoiler: yes we should and it’s actually quite easy to get started with it… and the benefits are amazing!

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Luciano Mammino

FullStack Dev & Cloud Architect

MARCO-TROISI

Why You Should Build Your Next Product With AppSync

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 3:10 pm

Level: Intermediate

Discover how AWS AppSync revolutionises product development by combining rapid prototyping capabilities with infinite scalability. This talk explores how AppSync serves as the ultimate productivity booster, enabling teams to quickly build and deploy robust, serverless applications that can grow from MVP to enterprise-scale without missing a beat. We’ll delve into AppSync’s key advantages, including its GraphQL-powered collaboration features, seamless AWS service integrations, and error-reducing native connectors. Learn how this cloud-native solution empowers small teams to fully own and scale products, surpassing traditional frameworks while minimising maintenance overhead.

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Marco Troisi

CTO at Trilo

MATHEUS-GUIMARAES

The Building Blocks of Generative AI

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 10:10 am

Level: Introductory

Join me on a quick tour of generative AI where we discover more about the origins and core concepts behind this revolutionary step in technology which is shaping our future . Learn about Foundation Models, Vector Embeddings, Transformer Architecture, the power of fine-tuning, RAG customizations, and more, to set yourself up for success in your generative AI journey.

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Matheus Guimaraes

Senior Developer Advocate at AWS

MATT-HOUGHTON

Migrating 600 Databases to AWS, Making Them Better, Faster & Cheaper

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 11:55 am

Level: Intermediate

In this session CDL an InsurTech from the UK will walk through the entire journey of real-life large-scale database migration from Oracle on premise to PostgreSQL in AWS. We’ll cover the process and share unique details, hits and tips covering zero downtime database migration, change data capture and schema conversion. We’ll show how we made the databases not only cheaper by removing licence costs but also how we sped up our development teams by proving self-service features and made our applications run faster.

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Matt Houghton

Data Architect at CDL Software, AWS Community Builder, AWS Ambassador

MATTHEW-BONIG

Lessons Learned from 5 Years with the AWS CDK

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 3:45 pm

Level: Advanced

I’ve been using the AWS CDK since before the 1.0 release and have learned a lot through trial and error. In this talk, I’ll share the best practices that I’ve discovered from the past 5 years.

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Matthew Bonig

Chief Cloud Architect at Defiance Ventures

NATALIYA-GODUNOK

Cloud Optimization at Scale the AWS Well-Architected Way

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 11:55 am

Level: Intermediate

As you grow your cloud adoption, you need to implement a robust governance strategy that would seamlessly integrate technology, people, and processes. By designing sustainable, automated, and efficient architectures from start, and by embracing a culture of continuous improvement, not only can you optimize your cloud usage but also drive innovation. In this session we will offer actionable insights and practical tips how to streamline your multi-account management, boost efficiency, and maintain control, while balancing cost, performance, and resiliency in your architectures.

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Nataliya Godunok

Cloud Optimization Success Solutions Architect at AWS

OPENING-KEYNOTE

Historical Context: From Makefiles to Infrastructure as Code

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 9:10 am

We rely on context a lot as engineers, passing state around so one function knows what the last did, and how it was impacted by the one before that, and on and on. Without passing around context, a lot of things would be much more difficult to build, or at least much more wordy. People need context too. Sure, we’re smarter than a function that only knows how to do one thing, and we can figure it out eventually, but it’s easier to learn a new tool or concept if someone hands it to us.

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Kat Cosgrove

Lead Developer Advocate at Dell

PANEL

Belfast Community Panel

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 1:50 pm

Join us for an insightful panel discussion where leaders from various tech communities come together to share their experiences and learnings. Our panelists represent a diverse array of backgrounds and expertise, bringing unique perspectives from their involvement in organizations such as Women Who Code, AWS Cloud Club, the AWS Hero and Community Builder programs, and the Northern Ireland Developers Conference. Attendees will gain valuable insights into how community engagement can drive personal and professional growth, foster innovation, and create supportive networks.

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Fiona Simpson

Enterprise Leader UKI @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Customer Obsessed

Kristi Perreault

AWS Serverless Hero | Principal Software Engineer in Cloud Architecture & Engineering Enablement

Niall Keys

Apprentice Software Engineer at Instil | AWS Cloud Club Captain for Belfast

Sapphire Duffy

Global Community Manager @ Women Who Code | Building Global Communities | Community Leadership

Yasmine Rigby

Placement Software Engineer, Hamilton Robson | Computer Science Student, UUB | Former City Lead, Women Who Code

PETER-MCAREE

Optimising your Analytics Engine Ingestion Process via Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion Pipelines

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 10:55 am

Level: Advanced

Using Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion Pipelines to interface with DynamoDB and ingest event data into an analytical engine - defined with CDK.

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Peter McAree

Staff Software Engineer at Magnify & AWS Community Builder

RAPHAEL-MANKE

Supercharge Lambda functions with Powertools for AWS Lambda

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 2:25 pm

Level: Introductory

AWS Lambda functions are a crucial part of serverless workloads in modern cloud architectures. They can be used for synchronous tasks, such as handling API calls, or for asynchronous tasks, like consuming SQS queues or DynamoDB streams. Lambda functions are designed to get the job done. However, as a developer, using Lambda functions comes with its challenges. Cloud environments are prone to failures, and when dealing with a large number of lambda functions, there is often repetitive code that is not directly related to the business logic and is highly specific to AWS.

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Raphael Manke

IT consultant building serverless apps

RYAN-BATCHELDER

Charting a Course Toward More Resilient Architectures in AWS

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 10:10 am

Level: Intermediate

Building resilient systems is hard. AWS provides a plethora of tools to allow you to leverage their scale and resources to avoid outages, but it’s not always clear how to apply those resources in a cost-effective manner. How do you know what levers to pull to make your application resilient without becoming financially impractical to operate? Is multi-region (or even multi-cloud) really the best way? Resilience isn’t a checkbox, it’s a spectrum - there’s a place along it for every application, and that place is different for everyone.

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Ryan Batchelder

Technology Architect - Liberty Mutual

SAMUEL-LOCK

Making a Case for Using Relational Databases in Serverless Applications

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 11:20 am

Level: Intermediate

SQL runs the world. So why does every documented example of a serverless application include DynamoDB instead? The reality is that DynamoDB has a pricing model and developer experience better suited to the serverless way of solving problems. But in some cases, a relational database is the better storage solution. And sometimes we may not even have a choice but to use it. In this session, we are going to help you identify when RDS will be the faster or cheaper option.

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Samuel Lock

Solutions Architect, ServerlessGuru

SARA-GERION

Reflecting on the Promise of Meritocracy in Tech: Ladders of Opportunity and Ceilings of Constraint

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 11:20 am

Level: Intermediate

Join us in this talk, open to anyone vested in the tech industry’s future, as we embark on an exploration into the ideal of meritocracy. Do the industry’s efforts in championing meritocracy match up to its noble intentions? Through a comprehensive analysis of data, research, and anecdotes, we examine our collective efforts in rewarding talent and hard work in the pursuit of fairness. This presentation examines the impact of our well-intentioned efforts in areas such as performance evaluations, hiring, promotion, skill development, and funding, inviting the audience to reevaluate their role in shaping a fair and just industry.

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Sara Gerion

Co-founder of SheSharp

SIMON-HANMER

Mystery of the Disappearing S3 Keys

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 12:30 pm

Level: Intermediate

Imagine a system designed to process millions of events per day, but as use grows, data mysteriously seems to disappear, only to re-appear later. We’ll talk about the what, why and how we investigated the symptoms, overturned some assumptions and finally delivered a resilient, serverless solution.

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Simon Hanmer

Senior Cloud Consultant, GlobalLogic UK&I | AWS Community Builder

SYL-TAYLOR

Embrace the Arm64 CPU architecture on the Cloud to master Performance, Cost, and Sustainability

Room: Cheese & Onion | Time: 1:50 pm

Level: Advanced

There is an increased demand for compute in modern cloud workloads. To help reduce costs and carbon footprint at scale, alternative CPU architectures such as Arm64 were introduced in innovative EC2 instances like those with AWS Graviton processors. In this session, we explore best practices for running software on Arm64 and modernizing your cloud infrastructure to support multi-CPU architectures.

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Syl Taylor

Specialist Solutions Architect - Efficient Compute

TANYA-ARVINTH

Platform Injection - A Junior Developer's Serverless Journey

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 9:45 am

Level: Intermediate

Onboarding our users onto new platforms via creation of AWS resources is currently a manual ticket laden process that can take days to even weeks. We are looking at ways to revamp this tedious user experience by effectively spinning up a maintainable solution with active participation from all developer team members of varied experienced, which is where AWS Serverless technologies stepped in. This talk explores how serverless architectures simplify development, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance processes, while empowering junior engineers to iterate rapidly, ensure compliance, and drive innovation within the financial services industry.

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Tanya Vo

Cloud Engineer

Arvinth Selvaraj

Principal Cloud Engineer at Fidelity Investments

THORSTEN-HOEGER

From Zero to Hero - Frictionless CI/CD pipelines in projen

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 2:25 pm

Level: Advanced

In this presentation, I will explore the innovative concept behind projen-pipelines, a tool designed to revolutionize how we approach continuous delivery (CD) pipelines for AWS CDK applications. The talk will focus less on the technical aspects of the library itself and more on the transformative idea it represents and the ambitious goals it aims to achieve. Projen-pipelines is not just a tool; it’s a vision for a more efficient, streamlined, and user-friendly approach to managing complex, multi-environment, and multi-account AWS CDK applications.

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Thorsten Hoeger

CEO, Cloud Evangelist @ Taimos

VADYM-KAZULKIN

High performance Serverless Java on AWS

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 11:55 am

Level: Intermediate

Java is for many years one of the most popular programming languages, but it used to have hard times in the Serverless community. Java is known for its high cold start times and high memory footprint, comparing to other programming languages like Node.js and Python. In this talk I’ll look at the general best practices and techniques we can use to decrease memory consumption and cold start times for Java Serverless applications on AWS Lambda including GraalVM (Native Image) and AWS own offering SnapStart based on Firecracker microVM snapshot and restore and CRaC (Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint) runtime hooks.

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Vadym Kazulkin

Head of Development at ip.labs

VELISWA-BOYA

Martial Arts and Well-Architected Applications?

Room: Salt & Vinegar | Time: 1:50 pm

Level: Intermediate

Architecture design considerations come from listening and understanding your key stakeholders and collaborating to build an application that meets their requirements. But we speak past each other! How then, do tech teams decode business speak to build applications that meet business requirements?

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Veliswa Boya

Senior Developer Advocate at AWS

WORKSHOP

Workshop: Build a Generative AI Enabled Web App

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 3:10 pm

Level: Introductory

This workshop has limited capacity so please sign up for a separate ticket here In this lab, you’ll learn how to integrate Amazon Bedrock with an existing web application to leverage large language models (LLMs) and provide generated responses to a prompt. By the end, you’ll have gained practical experience in using Amazon Bedrock to enhance your applications with context-aware insights from LLMs. This lab is subdivided into workflows, which build on each other, so should be completed in order.

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Stephen Howell

Academic Developer Advocate at AWS

YUAN-ZHANG

Chatbot Chronicles: An Intern's Adventure in Serverless Wonder

Room: Prawn Cocktail | Time: 9:45 am

Level: Introductory

Join me as I share my firsthand experience building a serverless chatbot. I’ll dive into the “why” behind the chatbot project and tackle the learning curve, overcome challenges, explore the architectural design, and discuss how the well-architected framework accelerates an intern’s delivery of business value in a mature project. Plus, I’ll give you an inside look at the chatbot’s awesome feature, especially its hurricane response capabilities.

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Yuan Zhang

Intern Software Engineer at Liberty IT