23rd November 2021 saw the second of our MLOps London meetups take place. With two more great speakers (Phil and Nick) and another enthusiastic audience, the event was a huge success.
The “Hybrid” event style continues, as it allows both those who don’t feel comfortable attending in person yet and those further afield to stay involved. It was good to see a larger proportion of attendees coming in person though, it feels like normality is starting to return to the meetup scene.
First up, we had Nick Masca, Head of Data Science for 1:1 Marketing and Digital Experiences at Marks and Spencer. He gave a really engaging talk on how M&S have managed to shift towards a more centralised MLOps platform. They’ve also managed to build in some engineering best-practices and the results show for themselves what a great success the work he’s been doing has been. A couple of the memorable stats were moving from ~10 manual processes/approvals down to 1 (or even 0) as well as taking uptime from 61% to 99% for some models.
After a short break to reload on drinks and pizza, we had our second talk, this time from Phil Basford.
Phil is Head of Solution Architecture at Inawisdom and an AWS Ambassador. His talk took us through the AWS components he uses for each step of the MLOps life cycle, the experiences he’s had building solutions for customers and some best practices that he’s adopted along the way.
Both talks were followed by some excellent questions from the audience. Once we’d wrapped up the questions from Phil’s talk it was great to see so many people sticking around to network with other MLOps enthusiasts. The networking was so successful we had to move on to the pub around the corner to avoid getting kicked out of the venue.
If you missed the meetup or want to catch any of it again, the recording is available on the Youtube Channel
The next MLOps London event will be held towards the end of January 2022. We hope to see many of you back again as well as some new faces. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!