talk-data.com

Join the Cloud Native Westminster CNCF Meetup - April Edition Register on the CNCF Westminster Event Page

Join us for an exciting evening of insightful Cloud Native discussions, networking, and engaging conversations hosted by Cloud Native Westminster!

📅 When: Thursday, 10th April 2025 📍 Venue: Microsoft London Office, 2 Kingdom St, London W2 6BD

🎤 Event Agenda 6:00 PM: Doors open. Enjoy complimentary food and drinks and networking opportunities 6:30 PM: Welcome, Introduction, and Venue Guidelines 6:40 PM: Fawaz Ghali (Developer Relations at Snowflake) 🔹 Topic: Scaling AI in the Cloud: LLMs, Smart Search and Automated Tuning 🔹 Discover how to efficiently scale AI solutions while maintaining security and cost efficiency. Learn about integrating LLMs, intelligent search, and automated tuning into your business workflows to optimise performance and impact. 7:00 PM: Networking Break 7:20 PM: Bryan Boreham (Distinguished Engineer at Grafana Labs) 🔸 Topic: Beyond Dashboarding: The Grafana Observability Stack 🔸 Explore the powerful capabilities behind Grafana dashboards, including metrics with Mimir, logs with Loki, and tracing with Tempo. Understand how to scale and integrate these tools effectively within your cloud-native ecosystem. 7:40 PM: Final Remarks, Group Photo, Fun Quizzes & Networking 8:00 PM: Event Closes

✨ Why Attend? Connect with industry leaders and Cloud Native enthusiasts. Deepen your knowledge of AI scalability and cloud observability. Expand your professional network in a friendly, inclusive environment.

💡 RSVP now and secure your spot! We look forward to welcoming you to an evening packed with insights, community engagement, and great conversations.

🎟️ Limited spaces available; register early to avoid missing out!

Venue: Riverbank House, 2 Swan Ln, London EC4R 3AD - IMPORTANT: LOCATION UPDATED! Please note:

1. 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. 🚨🚨🚨
2. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event.

If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.

If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as you know.

Code of Conduct: This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct.

As always, there'll be free food & drinks, generously provided by our host, Man Group.

Main Talks

Toolbox of a not-so Data Scientist - Tambe Tabitha Achere

This talk is about building data science solutions in scenarios where demos cannot be done on a notebook and dashboards do not suffice as a final deliverable. By the end of this session, the audience will have an idea of how data scientists can build the logic behind full-stack applications without the need to learn a backend framework.

I will do a deep dive into one of my projects and there will be lots of code samples accompanied by explanations that led to design decisions. The project I'll be diving into is one in which the data could not be pulled in so if you've ever had to build for data you couldn't see, this session is for you too. I'll highlight the tools, packages and processes that enabled it to be built.

Boosting Similarity Search With Real-time Stream Processing - Fawaz Ghali

The goal of similarity search and vector databases is to find similar results to the search query for unstructured data, such as text, images, and videos. The unstructured data first is vectorized, and stored in a vector format. There are publicly available tools to create vectors from unstructured data; similarly, there are vector databases to store and perform similarity searches. This is important because of the rising popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their combination with vector databases. Here, we present a hybrid approach by taking the strengths of vector databases and boosting them with traditional search and filtering techniques based on real-time stream processing. Vector databases are good for building high-performance vector search applications. On the other hand, stream processing can be used for real-time fast data storage for structured data (filters, tags, and contextual data). In this work, we're adding context and memory to vector databases to ingest, enrich, predict, and act on your data in a simplified but efficient approach. In this talk, we’ll focus on how Real-time compute APIs help leverage the processing capabilities of a distributed cluster, so you aren’t leaving large potential performance gains on the table. The combination of Real-time storage and computing provides a unique synergy that enables applications to address real-time use cases at any scale.

⚡ Lightning Talks

Open-Source Science (OSSci) - Tim Bonnemann

Open-Source Science (OSSci) is a new NumFOCUS initiative – launched in July 2022 in partnership with IBM – that aims to accelerate scientific research by improving the ways open source software in science gets done (built, used, funded, sustained, recognized, etc.). OSSci connects scientists, OSS developers and other stakeholders to share best practices, identify common pain points, and explore solutions together. The five OSSci interest groups to date cover domain-specific topics (chemistry/materials, life sciences/healthcare, climate/sustainability) as well as cross-domain topics (reproducibility, map of science), with more to be rolled out in 2024. This lightning talk will provide a brief overview of OSSci’s activities to date, our plans for 2024, and how you can get involved.

(Maybe) faster Pandas with CuDF on the GPU (perhaps) - Ian Ozsvald

NVIDIA's CuDF promises 100-1000x GPU speed ups with 100% compatibility, with a bit of effort it can be made to work. This talk shows what could work and which bits (including setup!) can be painful

Logistics Doors open at 6.30 pm (get there early as you have to sign-in via building security), talks start at 7 pm, drinks from 9 pm in the bar. We will have reduced capacity for this event but there will be plenty of people to discuss data science questions with!

Please unRSVP in good time if you realise you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members!

Follow @pydatalondon (https://twitter.com/pydatalondon) for updates and early announcements.

Data Relay is back in Manchester on Friday, 6 October

RSVP via website https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/datarelay-2023-manchester-tickets-636529215017

Data Relay will be in Manchester on Friday 6th October 2023, featuring top quality Microsoft Data Platform content from great speakers. The day consists of a series of 50 minute technical presentations for all levels - beginner, intermediate and advanced. You can switch tracks throughout the day to enjoy the sessions that interest you the most. Address: Odeon Great Northern Warehouse, 235 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 4EN Registration: Tickets are on a first come, first served basis. Doors open at 8:30am on the day with sessions starting at 9:00am. Competitions: If you allow a sponsor to scan your QR code you will be entered into their raffle prize draw. By doing so you opt in to receive sales and marketing information from them, using the contact details you provided during registration. All sponsors will provide an unsubscribe link in their emails. Food: We'll be providing a light lunch, plus tea & coffee at a couple of breaks. We will be catering for vegan food, according to your food preferences during registration. Dress Code: Casual First time at Data Relay? Everyone has a 'first event', including the speakers and organisers of this event. We're lucky to be a part of the UK Microsoft Data Platform community, one of the most friendly and welcoming tech communities out there. Whether you're in a group or on your own, you'll be made to feel welcome and will learn lots about new and existing technology. It's a great opportunity to meet your peers and maybe even your Data Platform heroes! If you have any queries, contact us at [email protected] and we'll help you out.

Manchester Scedule 09:00 - Keynote & Welcome 09:30 1 - Saving Your Wallet from the Cloud - Kevin Feasel 09:30 2 - AI Driven Data Enrichment with Azure Cognitive Search - Matt How 09:30 3 - Automating Database Deployments using Azure DevOps - Grant Fritchey 10:45 1 - Delta Lake Tables 101 - Kamil Nowinski 10:45 2 - Get a Load of this - Realistic Load Testing for Power BI, explained! - Matt Lakin 10:45 3 - Introduction to Bicep for the Cloud DBA - Frank Geisler 11:40 1 - Getting Insight from Anything: using IoT for good! - Andrew Blance 11:40 2 - A Hybrid SQL Journey: The daily routine of a Hybrid DBA - Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz 11:40 3 - Combining web apps and AI - how to unlock the power of the Azure OpenAI Service - Ben Jarvis 12:30 Lunch 13:30 1 - Securing Data Workloads with Azure Landing Zones - Chris Murray 13:30 2 - Ned Stratton - Regex in PowerShell: How to grasp it and why you should grasp it 13:30 3 - Sweet streams (are made of this: Hubs, Stream Analytics, Datalake) - Pálmi Símonarson 14:25 1 - The Kusto experience in Fabric - Brian Bønk 14:25 2 - Cognitive Services Extravaganza! - Gosia Borzęcka 14:25 3 - Examples of query tuning in SQL Server - Torsten Strauß 15:40 1 - Model Creation in Azure AutoML and Ingestion Through Excel - Lewis Prince 15:40 2 - DAX Explained Through Dance, Memes and Dad Jokes - Barney Lawrence 15:40 3 - Real-time Fraud Detection Challenges and Solutions - Fawaz Ghali 16:35 Raffle & Close