Architecture Groups Sydney

Welcome to the next 2026 AWS Sydney Well-Architected Meetup!

Hi Architects, Welcome to the next 2026 AWS Sydney Well-Architected User Group Meetup! Each month we cover off AWS best-practices across all pillars and give away drones - lots of drones 🥳 **Please also note that AWS Security now requests a company name and company email where it is available. If you are a student, please list your institution and your student email address at that institution 👍** We'll be announcing more speakers on [https://well-architected.me](https://well-architected.me/) and previewing presentations during the coming weeks - our speakers and details this month include: * **Michael Taylor, Lakebase Specialist, Databricks** **How Lakebase provides a well-architected platform for next generation application and AI development.** Come and hear how Databricks experts show how customers run applications and agents on Lakebase; serverless Postgres governed by Unity Catalog. See instant branching, scale-to-zero, point-in-time recovery and synced tables in action. The Databricks team will also give a first look at LTAP; one open, governed copy of data for transactions and analytics, with no ETL in between. * **Mystery Speaker** **The AWS AI Competency - can automation support?** Achieving the AWS AI Competency can unlock many benefits for AI customers. In this talk, we explore if achievement of a competency can be automated. This month's menu will include: * Pizzas * Beer * Wine: Big and red 🤤 So come join us at 5:30 for a 6pm start, followed by beer, wine, pizza and friendly networking after our talks :-) Tired of Linkedin’s "thought leadership”, spam and advertising? Join https://well-architected.me/ , the AWS community built for architects, developers and cloud professionals. * Connect with experienced AWS practitioners * Preview upcoming AWS Meetups and relive past content * Create and review beautiful AWS case studies in minutes * Prepare for AWS certifications with curated quizzes * Show your manager and reports you’re well-architected (Please note that by registering to attend you agree to your details being shared as and where required with Amazon Web Services and AWS Well-Architected User Group partners)

SSP TUE - CITY LIGHT & SHADOWS IN MONOCHROME : Sydney’s Little Laneways

For this photography walk, we’ll explore a very different side of Sydney CBD — its narrow laneways, hidden passages, old sandstone walls and urban spaces — with a particular focus on **light, shadow and monochrome photography**. We will follow the City of Sydney Culture Walks route **“Hidden – Sydney’s Little Laneways”**, which winds through some of the lesser-known lanes and back streets of central Sydney. Rather than concentrating on Sydney’s familiar landmarks, the aim of this walk is to look more closely at the city itself: shafts of sunlight falling between tall buildings, deep shadows in narrow lanes, repeating architectural lines, reflections, textures, silhouettes and people moving through patches of light. During the walk, we’ll look for opportunities to photograph: * strong contrasts between sunlight and shadow * people and silhouettes entering pools of light * geometric shapes, lines and repeating patterns * sandstone, brick, concrete and other urban textures * narrow laneways framed by taller buildings * reflections and layered compositions * small details that become more striking when colour is removed ### **Meeting point:** Chambers Coffee, Gateway Sydney, 1 Macquarie Pl, Sydney NSW 2000 **Start:** 10:30 am **Approximate finish:** Around 12:30 pm **Lunch:** Venue to be confirmed After the walk, anyone who would like to stay is very welcome to join us for a relaxed lunch nearby. ### Come along, slow down, watch the light, and discover some of Sydney’s hidden corners in monochrome.

Agentic AI Night: AI Infrastructure

Join us for an evening of insightful talks, valuable connections, and great company. This one is a collaboration: CNCF Sydney x AAIF are bringing the cloud native and agentic AI communities into the same room. Everyone is shipping agents. Far fewer people are talking about what it takes to actually run them. As agentic AI moves from prototypes to production, the infrastructure underneath matters as much as the models and the agents themselves. **Speaker 1:** Hrittik Roy, Founding Platform Advocate at vCluster and CNCF Ambassador **Talk 1:** From Local Inference to Kubernetes: What Changes When Your LLM Gets Busy? **Details:** Running an LLM locally is a great starting point. But what happens when one user becomes hundreds, requests compete for GPU memory, and response times start climbing? This talk follows an inference request from prompt to generated tokens, explaining prefill, decode and the KV cache. We’ll explore how batching, model caching and GPU scheduling affect latency and throughput, then introduce disaggregated inference: running prefill and decode on separate workers, including when the added complexity actually makes sense. Using vLLM and NVIDIA Dynamo as examples, we’ll connect these concepts to serving models on Kubernetes and measuring what matters: time to first token, token generation speed, and GPU utilisation. You’ll leave understanding what happens inside an LLM inference request, where the bottlenecks appear as you move beyond local serving, when disaggregated inference is worth considering, and the Kubernetes building blocks for GPU workloads. **Speaker 2:** Olga Mirensky, Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Ping Identity **Talk 2:** Platform Engineering for AI Agents **Details:** Managed agent platforms give you runtimes, sandboxes and enforcement points, but not an internal platform. Drawing on enterprise delivery in financial services and tech, this talk walks through a multi-agent architecture on a cloud managed platform, and the layer you still build yourself: policies derived from your own architecture, reusable blueprints, and telemetry across a fleet of agents. Platforms make agents fast to build. Deciding what’s worth building is still the hard part. On the night: Free entry · Food & drinks · Networking · Live Q&A Thanks to Google for hosting us, and to the AAIF team for partnering on this one. Seats are limited - RSVP to save your spot. See you there! 👋

Networking Drinks #33

Christmas is just around the corner! Come join us once again at **The Art Syndicate**, a unique wine bar and gallery nestled in Surry Hills for a relaxed evening blending local drinks and meaningful conversations. **Event info:** ✅ Discover amazing NSW wine, beer and spirits. ✅ Expand your network of designers & make connections that last. ✅ No formal talks or speeches *Check out my reviews on this page to see what others are saying!* **Venue information:**
 You'll find us at this art gallery & wine bar in Surry Hills. They exclusively offer a curated selection of NSW-based wine, beer and spirits! There is even art for sale! **Check them out on socials:** https://www.instagram.com/theartsyndicate.com.au/ **How to find us:**
 We are on Bourke Street, a short walk from Oxford Street or Central Station. **Join our What'sApp group:**
 You'll find this link in the "Event Chat" section of this page :D Cheers, Josh

Under the Hood of AI on AWS: Rethinking Data & Application Health

Hello Amazonians, AWS User Group Sydney and TiDB are teaming up for an evening on the gap between a working AI demo and a system you can run in production. Two speakers will share what they have learned running AI workloads on AWS. **🎤 Hear from:** * **Shahed Kazi, Global Lead, Cloud Architecture & Strategy @ Everlight Radiology** Application Health at Scale with Agentic AI: Extending AWS DevOps Agent with AI Agents and Skills * **Ken Yap, Ph.D., Technical Account Manager @ TiDB** *One data layer instead of four: simplifying your AI stack on AWS* Stay after the talks to meet fellow builders over drinks and nibbles! 🍕🍻 **Agenda:** 17:30 \| Arrival\, registration and refreshments 18:00 \| Introductions 18:05 \| Talk 1: Application Health at Scale with Agentic AI Shahed Kazi, Global Lead, Cloud Architecture & Strategy at Everlight Radiology 18:35 \| Talk 2: One data layer instead of four: simplifying your AI stack on AWS Ken Yap, Ph.D., Technical Account Manager at TiDB 19:05 \| Networking\, food\, and drinks\! 🍻🍕 **Event details:** 📅 Date: Wednesday, 4 November 2026 ⏰ Time: 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM (doors open 5:30 PM) 📍 Location: Level 8/2 Market St, Sydney NSW 2000 (Please enter via Kent St to access the building). RSVP now to save your spot! See you there, **The PolarSeven and TiDB Team** *Would you like to present? Complete [this form](https://forms.gle/GAqrJggTjme6Uzsu6) and we'll be in touch soon.*

Data Driven or Data Distracted!

Our CCX Sydney October event features a very lively and topical panel discussion entitled Data Driven or Data Distracted We will be applying a $10.00 cover charge to cover Food and drinks and on this occasion will be kindly hosted by the ONSET https://theonset.com.au The Onset is a specialist recruitment business deeply connected to Australia’s design and technology ecosystem. They work with ambitious companies, brilliant industry experts and a wider group of specialists across data, AI, design and transformation through The Omnia Collective. About the session **How Product, Design & Engineering actually use evidence to make decisions** How much data do we really need to make better product decisions? And when does being “data-driven” start getting in the way of good product thinking? For this CCX Sydney session, we’re bringing together four practitioners from different corners of the product ecosystem — analytics, strategy and service design, UX/CX, and engineering — to explore the role data and evidence actually play in product development and delivery. Each speaker will have **15 minutes to make their own case** for — or against — being **DATA-DRIVEN OR DATA-DISTRACTED**. Rather than presenting a single view, they’ll challenge us to look at how research, analytics, customer insight, AI, product requirements engineering and data can influence the decisions we make — from defining the problem and creating the PRD through to designing, building and releasing the product. Our speakers bring four very different perspectives: **Olga Pasikova\, Senior Analytics Director; Rob Tot\, Strategy & Service Design Lead; Thomas Shillingford\, UX \| CX \| Strategy \| AI and Author; and David Berigny\, Forward Deployed Engineer\.** Each panel member will bring their own experience, provocations and examples to the question: **when does data help us make better decisions — and when does it simply give us more information to react to?** Then we turn up the heat. Following the four presentations, **Sophie Greenfield, Senior Product & AI Designer at CBA**, will lead a lively panel discussion, bringing the speakers together to challenge each other's perspectives and explore the tensions between data, evidence, intuition, customer understanding and design judgement. Because being data-driven sounds simple. **Knowing what data to trust, what it actually means, and when to ignore it is where things get interesting.** **About our Panel:** ### Olga Pasikova **Senior Analytics Director** Olga Pasikova is a Senior Analytics Director and experienced digital analytics specialist with more than a decade working across data, analytics and digital measurement. She brings a strong ability to translate complex analytics challenges into clear strategic direction, helping teams use data to understand behaviour, measure outcomes and make better-informed decisions. Olga is also an active member of Sydney’s data and analytics community. ### Rob Tot **Strategy & Service Design Lead** Rob Tot is a Strategy and Service Design Lead who works at the intersection of customer needs, business strategy and service innovation. His work brings together strategic thinking and human-centred design to help organisations navigate complex problems, uncover opportunities and turn insight into meaningful product and service outcomes. ### Thomas Shillingford **UX \| CX \| Strategy \| AI \| Author** Thomas Shillingford is a UX and CX strategist, designer, author and speaker with extensive experience across digital products and customer experiences. His career has included work spanning research, customer journeys, interaction design, usability, design strategy and large-scale digital transformation. More recently, Thomas has been exploring the impact of AI on design practice, including how AI is changing design systems, strategy and the role of human judgement. ### David Berigny **Forward Deployed Engineer** David Berigny is a Forward Deployed Engineer working at the intersection of technology, product development and real-world customer problems. His role brings engineering directly into the product development process — translating customer and business needs into practical technical solutions, testing ideas in the field and using evidence from real-world implementation to inform what gets built and how it evolves. ### Sophie Greenfield FACILITATOR **Senior Product Designer & Facilitator** Sophie Greenfield is a Senior Product Designer at Commonwealth Bank with more than 20 years’ experience across UX, product design, research and digital strategy. Her career has spanned product strategy, customer research and experience design across organisations including CommBank, Westpac and ING Direct. Sophie has a particular interest in the intersection of **data, customer insight, product strategy and AI-enabled design**. She has been exploring and teaching AI-enabled design practices, from research synthesis and hypothesis validation to rapid prototyping and new ways of working for designers. For **DATA-DRIVEN OR DATA-DISTRACTED?**, Sophie will facilitate the conversation between our four speakers, challenging their perspectives and helping unpack the bigger question: **when does evidence genuinely improve product decisions — and when can data become a distraction from understanding the customer?** We are so excited to be wrapping up the year with this awesome panel discussion hosted by new friends of CCX Sydney, the ONSET. [https://theonset.com.au/](https://theonset.com.au/) Lastly make sure you Join us for sponsored drinks from Amplitude post the event at a nearby bar: Amplitude is the AI analytics platform built for data analysts, PMs, and growth teams. It doesn't just report on what happened; it shows you why and what to do next, all self-serve and in real time. And we're buying drinks. Join us after the meetup at the Strawberry hills hotel Regards Kevin, Lydia, Sylvia, James and Carolina.

Vibrant Colours and Man Made Structures

Microburbs Hackathon

# Join the Microburbs Hackathon New: one day and more than 200 kinds of property and urban data, from live listings to the 2026 Census, free. Build anything you like with property and urban data: an app, a map or a video. The key covers the City of Sydney council area. **Free to enter, in Sydney or online from anywhere in Australia.** Founders, agents, investors, designers, marketers, analysts and coders are all welcome. **Open for a limited time only.** Places are limited, so apply. We choose who takes part against our selection criteria. Applying does not guarantee a place. **Bring your laptop.** Power and lunch are provided. Use any AI you like, and have your subscriptions ready. Teams are three to six people. ## What is the Microburbs Hackathon? A one-day build on Saturday 7 November 2026 where Microburbs hands you the property data we normally sell, for the whole City of Sydney council area, and you make something with it. Free to enter. Come in person at UTS Business School, Level 4, near Sydney CBD, or enter remotely from anywhere in Australia. Run with Dr Eugene Dubossarsky and Data Science Sydney, the Sydney AI + Data meetup. It is a community day as much as a contest: you meet the people who build with this kind of data in Sydney, and you leave with something to show. We are grateful to our hosts and sponsors, the UTS Centre for Business Intelligence and Data Analytics for making this hackathon possible. Please register through this link : https://www.microburbs.com.au/hackathon

TechWalking - Sydney - Networking Event for Tech Professionals

**TechWalking is here to stay in Sydney!** 🌊🚶‍♂️A huge thank you to our co-hosts — Malathy, Pragnya, Xi, Felix, Sujata and Amee — for making it happen! Are you a tech professional looking to network beyond the screen? Join us for a refreshing **#TechWalking** event along the stunning Royal Botanic Garden! It’s the perfect chance to connect with industry peers while getting in some steps! Whether you're in software development, cybersecurity, data science, or any tech-related field, this is the perfect opportunity to expand your network in a relaxed setting. 🌅 **Meeting Point:** Archibald Memorial Fountain, Hyde Park 🏖 **Route:** 4 km walk through the Botanical Garden to the Sydney Opera House 🕙 **Start Time:** 10 AM sharp—don’t be late, or you might have to sprint to catch up! **Please note:** unfortunately, dogs aren’t allowed in the Botanical Gardens. A bit sad, we know 🐶💔 Looking forward to meeting you all in real life! **TechWalking is free, and always will be.** But keeping the community going takes time, effort, and a few ongoing costs. If you enjoy TechWalking and would like to help us keep it growing, any donation is greatly appreciated: [https://tech-walking.yanamartens.com/donate](https://tech-walking.yanamartens.com/donate) **TechWalking Community page: [https://tech-walking.yanamartens.com/](https://tech-walking.yanamartens.com/)** *** Join the TechWalking group on LinkedIn! [https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14477058/](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14477058/) Just moved to Australia? Grab your FREE guide to landing your tech job! [https://yanamartens.com/first-tech-job-in-australia/](https://yanamartens.com/first-tech-job-in-australia/) Follow me on LinkedIn for more information: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yana-martens/ Subscribe to YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ITCareerinAustralia

Stoics in the park: NEW LOCATION- Sydney Park

Unlike other philosophies, Stoicism was named after a place not a person, making it accessible to ALL people. In ancient greco-roman times people would meet at the Stoa, where they would discuss Stoic Philosophy. We can meet in the park just as the stoic sages 1000s of years ago. Join us to read through and discuss Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Google books has a FREE PDF you can download. No need to do any homework, we will read together and discuss. Am looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Event fee (optional) is $2, this goes to admin costs of running the group, please consider I am from Wollongong and wanted to keep this group when original organiser stepped down. I have significant travel expenses and am generally organising creative events that take resources. A gratuity would be a wonderful way to make me feel appreciated. Pay on the day, payID 0416147804, PayPal: paypal.me/jonnikaren or private message for direct deposit details. In lieu of event fee, you can buy me a coffee :)

WordPress AI Tools vs AI Website Builders

**Speaker Bio:** * Brett Stone is the founder of [Stone Digital](https://stonedigital.com.au/) a specialist web design and development agency based in Sydney. His agency specialises in building high-quality, custom websites with WordPress as its primary platform and CMS. Brett is actively involved in the WordPress community as a co-organiser of the WordPress Sydney Meetup and regularly attends flagship WordCamp conferences alongside his team. **Presentation outline:** * **WordPress AI Tools:** Brett shares his hands-on experience and perspective on emerging WordPress AI tools, including WordPress Core MCP, [WPVibe.ai](http://WPVibe.ai) and [ByMiles.ai](http://ByMiles.ai) * **AI Website Builders:** A practical review of AI-powered website builders such as Lovable, Base44 and Replit, exploring their capabilities, strengths and limitations. * **Sydney Website Research:** Insights from original research involving the analysis of 10,000+ websites across Sydney to investigate the adoption of AI-powered website-building tools including Lovable, v0, Base44 and Claude. * **WordPress AI Tools vs AI Website Builders:** Brett's overall perspective on how these two approaches compare, their respective use cases, and what they could mean for the future of web design and development. **Running sheet:** 6pm-6.30pm: Arrival, pizza and drinks, and informal networking 6.30pm-6:35pm: Welcome and introductions 6:35pm-7pm: Presentation 7pm-7.15pm: Q&A session 7.15pm Onwards: Networking

SSP FRIDAY - SUB BASE PLATYPUS & JACARANDAS IN BLOOM

Today we go to Sub Base Platypus then to see the jacarandas in bloom at Milson Park and McDougall Street in Kirribilli. We leave Chambers at 1030 to get the ferry across to Sub Base Platypus at Kirribilli. Lunch will be upstairs at the Kirribilli Hotel, booked for 1pm. 35-37 Broughton Street, opposite Milsons Point train station.