Cloud-Native Platforms for Rapid Development: An AFG Case Study

Australian Finance Group (AFG) are a national mortgage broker aggregator headquartered in Perth. They operate in a competitive market and must innovate to stay ahead. Based on lessons learnt from nearly a decade in the cloud, the company’s technology strategy called for an entirely new Cloud-Native Platform (CNP) to meet the pace of innovation, enabling software developers to rapidly build and deploy new services, tools and integrations for customers.

We are privileged to host AFG technologists Mick O'Connor, Liam Hughes and Levi Jarick, who were central to the design, implementation and operation of AFG's Cloud-Native Platform. They will explain some of the challenges encountered, including environment complexity, cloud engineering bottlenecks and security concerns associated with empowering developers to build infrastructure. They will then discuss the use of people, process and technology to address these challenges, including:

• Finding experienced partners and successfully integrating development with operations.
• Leveraging CDK, Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA), AWS Control Tower, Sumo Logic, etc.
• Building a new core network and security guardrails.
• Launching and evolving the CNP.
• Laying tracks just ahead of the oncoming train!

Group organiser Cristian Southall will introduce the session, covering key concepts and architecture patterns for 'landing zones' and cloud operating platforms.

Presenters

Mick O'Connor - Cloud Infrastructure Manager, AFG

Mick has been leading the AFG cloud team since 2020. Prior to this, Mick led cloud and development teams in variety of organisation and industries, including BankWest, iiNet and Genomics Medicine Ireland.

Liam Hughes – Solution Architect, AFG

Liam has led and built AFG’s cloud solutions from the very beginning. He was the architect for CNP, with a large focus on the core network.

Levi Jarick – Senior Cloud Engineer, AFG

Levi has been a Lead Engineer with AFG’s cloud team since 2019. In collaboration with partners JourneyOne, he led the design, build and testing of CNP.

Cristian Southall – Chief Technology Officer, JourneyOne

Among many areas of R&D focus, Cristian has been considering matters of cloud platform design and adoption for many years. He has advised on and implemented cloud operating platforms for start-ups, scale-ups and corporates. He is an AWS Ambassador, AWS Community Builder and AWS User Group Leader.

Time and Place

Refreshments from 5.30pm for a 6.00pm start. We typically leave time for networking after presentations.

Riff is on the Ground Floor, 45 St Georges Terrace, Perth.

RSVP

RSVP via the event page at Meetup.com.