Open Source in Finance Forum New York 2024

OpenSource has proliferated in every industry, and Financial Services is no exception. While OpenTelemetry is the 2nd most popular CNCF project behind Kubernetes, there is still a fair amount of confusion and concern around its adoption. Nearly all financial services customers are leveraging OpenTelemetry in some form, and yet we still hear varying myths and concerns depending on who we speak with.  In this session, we'll discuss some of the nuanced hows and whys of OpenTelemetry, clarify myths and confusion, and provide an update on how Financial Services customers are leveraging the standard in pursuit of modern observability.

This talk will be the hardships, lessons learned, and remediation techniques put in place to manage a large multi-tenant, multi-cluster on-premise kubernetes estate, while adhering to tight regulatory controls such as PCI, SOX, SOC1. It will go over hygiene techniques, chaos engineering, resource management, technology lifecycle management/kubernetes in place upgrades, event driven architectures for mitigating and self-healing issues, along with other scenarios and topics. All of this entails a lot of integration with many CNCF components, such as Prometheus, Grafana, Cortex, Alert Manager, ArgoCD, Contour, Envoy, Kube Bench, and more. Some areas of focus will be targeting some common themes we see everyday when trying to consume CNCF and/or OSS products, and the adjustments we have to make to have them fit our regulatory policies.

Running a high-performance computing platform is completely different as you move to the cloud. The emphasis on rapid, intelligent task scheduling to maximise the use of static on-premises compute clusters and the need to provide multi-tenancy at the cluster-level goes away. In this session, we will present HTC-Grid, an open-source high-throughput compute (HTC) grid system built on top of tried and tested cloud native services. HTC-Grid recognises that the game has changed and that the traditional schedulers often employed in financial services solve a problem that doesn't exist anymore. HTC-Grid addresses massive computational demands by combining very high-throughput scheduling, low round-trip latency and seamless infrastructure orchestration. HTC-Grid incorporates learnings from many FSI customers re-inventing their grid systems for the cloud. The project was initially developed as an open-source blueprint by AWS, but has been donated to FINOS in order to share the obtained knowledge, provide a reference architecture that can be used to build and adapt a modern high-throughput compute solution, and to incorporate contributions from customers and other CSPs alike.

The bitemporal data model is a well known tool for solving key reporting and compliance requirements in the financial domain, but it's tricky to implement correctly and often painful to maintain in practice. This talk will explain the basics, review the state of the art, and discuss the pitfalls of various approaches to implementing bitemporal systems. We will reflect on the question: How can OSS database technology support financial services organizations to build robust and flexible bitemporal systems at lower costs in a cloud native context?

Global compliance, regulation, and cloud controls are increasingly scattered and diverse, creating significant challenges for financial service organizations. This talk delves into the evolution of public cloud controls, highlighting one bank's journey from open-source tools to contemporary Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) services, and exploring the pain points that remain.

Join us to explore the current landscape of cloud controls, the complexities of adopting and customizing frameworks such as CIS, NIST, or AWS Foundational Best Practices, and the unique difficulties faced by multi-cloud FS organizations in achieving control parity across different CSPs.