Open Source in Finance Forum New York 2024

Observability is a crucial component of modern, cloud-native software delivery. OpenTelemetry, a CNCF project, is revolutionizing the observability space by providing a standard, built-in framework for telemetry data. In this session, you'll learn the fundamentals of OpenTelemetry and how it's being used to understand and monitor financial applications at organizations such as Vanguard.

As financial firms continue to adopt cloud at growing speed, observability has become increasingly critical to help detect and resolve issues and achieve system reliability. Generally, companies with large volumes of pre-existing code look to adopt an industry leading observability platform, which requires minimal effort for adoption, and provides proprietary agents with out-of-the-box instrumentation supporting a wide variety of technologies, infrastructure components, and frameworks. As technology evolves rapidly, observability platforms are challenged to support merging services, applications, and frameworks. During our session, we will discuss how OpenTelemetry (OTel), used in conjunction with other enterprise observability platforms, can complement observability platforms in providing support for newer technologies. Additionally, we will showcase how easy it can be to instrument an application with OTel by leveraging GenAI/ChatGPT, and debunk beliefs that OTel instrumentation requires significant developer overhead.

As applications evolve from monolithic to distributed systems, teams must comprehend the path of each transaction across various systems to assess each system's performance. This is critical in financial systems where transaction speed directly impacts financial outcomes and customer experience. However, a key concern is determining the optimal level of observability for applications. Injecting excessive observability elements into the code can potentially degrade application performance and added risk of sensitive data exposure. How can one decide what to monitor without compromising application performance? This talk explores the challenges of instrumenting high-throughput, high-performance applications without compromising their performance. It also addresses strategies for maximizing system observability to swiftly pinpoint root causes of issues, while managing the risks associated with implementing intricate observability solutions, including potential exposure of sensitive data

Energy consumption has an increasing impact on financial institutions - in terms of cost, environmental footprint, and available capacity. In 2022, the world’s data centers consumed 1% of the world’s total energy, expected to grow to 8% in the following years. As financial institutions try to continuously innovate, they also incur large energy bills. Financial institutions know their total energy footprint, but lack data that enables them to optimize applications, place them in data centers with lower energy cost or environmental impact, or to make tradeoffs between performance and energy consumption. What they lack is application-level power monitoring. Kepler is a CNCF project founded by Red Hat’s emerging technologies group with contributions from IBM Research and Intel. It is an open source project that captures power metrics across a wide range of platforms, focusing on reporting, reduction and regression. In this talk, powered by a live demo, we will introduce Kepler and show how it helps enterprises understand their energy footprint and improve their IT operations, and how community members can contribute to the project, especially for adding new supported platforms.

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.