Hi everyone!

Please join us on Thursday the 3rd of July from 5.30pm.

Topic: Kiwibank’s Journey to DevOps and DevSecOps at Scale
Join us at the July AWSAKL Meetup as Damian Kobylinski shares the story of how Kiwibank scaled DevOps and DevSecOps across the organisation.

This session will walk through the early foundations, the evolution of key capabilities, and the current state of Kiwibank’s modern software delivery platform.

Built on a broad suite of AWS services, the platform plays a critical role in enabling secure, rapid change across the enterprise. Learn how Kiwibank is using this platform to embed security, accelerate delivery, and empower teams to innovate with confidence.

Our speaker this month:
Damian Kobylinski, Head of Engineering Practice @ Kiwibank
Damian is a seasoned engineering leader who began his career in financial automation before transitioning into cloud computing around the time AWS launched in Sydney. With extensive experience designing and migrating platforms on AWS, Damian has spent the past 3.5 years at Kiwibank, where he has played a key role in improving developer experience as part of the Developer Platforms team. Now as Head of Engineering Practice, he drives enablement across and beyond engineering teams, with a focus on policies, frameworks, and standards.

*IMPORTANT*
Due to security protocols at AWS’s office, you must complete this FORM at least 48 hours prior to the start of the event. It is compulsory to complete this form for all attendees to gain access into the venue. You will need to provide photo ID to building security upon arrival.

Doors open at 5pm
o 5:30 pm – Start Networking
o 6:15 pm – Discussion/Q&A
o 7:00 pm – Networking
o 7:30 pm – Finish

Food and Drinks provided

Venue Location:
AWS Auckland Office (Level 13, Commercial Bay, 15 Customs Street West, Auckland)
Directions for Entry:
Entry to the PWC building is by the main entrance on Customs Street.
Go up the escalators and you will see the Spectra cafe and PWC reception on the right. Walk through the lobby behind you and turn right towards the elevators. Take the lift to level 13.
Nearby parking is next door at Downtown Carpark.

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/