STACK 2022 Developer Conference

Learn how organisations can leverage on Singpass Transact APIs for the purpose of exchanging information and making decisions. The session is meant for business users and developers exploring to streamline their digital journey.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

It’s a common story: someone from the business wants to develop a new feature and delivery teams are excited to work on something new. But… a huge system lurking in the background is hard to change and slows everybody down. Most application modernisation initiatives seeking to improve such situations tend to be long and risky affairs driven by IT departments, while business stakeholders are unconvinced and reluctant to lend their support.

In this talk, we will share how the Economic Development Board (EDB) and VMware Tanzu Labs tamed the ‘elephants’ in the room by using the Swift method to:
- Understand how a monolithic legacy system supports existing business flows.
- Future-proof an existing system by re-architecting it to be flexible to change.
- Start small and make incremental gains with buy-in from the business.

Continuous integration and delivery (CICD for short) has evolved quite a bit in the last few years, and in 2022 there are an abundance of different tools and methodologies for software developers to recruit in order to deliver their products to the market faster. In this talk, Aries will highlight some of these best practices, as well as dive into the future of what CICD looks like. Topics such as managing complex application state, application dependency management, and continuous security as a part of CI will be covered.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Imagine driving your car and looking for a place to park. You speak to your phone, asking for the nearest available parking slot. After a short while, you get a verbal response giving you direction to the nearest and available slot. A few technologies are at play here. First, we need to train a Deep Learning model to make accurate inferences. After that, the model can be deployed close to the data source to process the video frames. This is where Edge Computing comes into play, running the algorithm with the trained model. Through chatbots, analytics, database, AI and other solutions, you can be guided to the nearest slot. This presentation touches on several smart city use cases and the associated data pipeline as well as some of the key technologies and considerations to make our city smarter.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

In this digital era, everything has moved online, even for frauds and scams. Be it spoofed websites, phishing emails, fake SMSes and calls, and various other creative ways of scamming the people are only on the rise. Government websites and other communication channels are especially vulnerable to scams as citizens may easily fall prey. It is thus vital to know what can be trusted on the Internet. At OGP, we believe in bringing public officers and the citizens together to fight scams, by providing means of building digital trust and secure collaboration. We will talk about GoGovSG and ForSG, a link shortener that authenticates communication between public officers and citizens. We will highlight the impact of this product and how it will continue to develop to play a role in our nation's defense-in-depth strategy against scams.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

At Google, we build technology that helps people do more for the planet. For the STACK 2022 session, we will showcase a want to propose a deep dive and demo on a revolutionary technology from Google called Kubernetes config connector, which helps to simplify compliance and DevSecOps, FinOps.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

With the widespread adoption of Kubernetes in organisations, engineering teams have found themselves managing a variety of clusters that differ in scale and usage. As the number of clusters grow, the complexity in managing them introduces new challenges for engineers to tackle. Maintaining clusters involves frequent changes related to upgrades, security and adding new components; a multi-cluster setup further complicates these operations. For engineering teams to be efficient and productive, an ideal multi-cluster management strategy and release workflow is paramount.

This session aims to showcase how a multi-cluster release workflow can reduce operational overheads and streamline the cluster management with the aid of automation and GitOps best practices.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Crowd counting outdoors is a challenging problem as there are no defined entrances and exits. Furthermore, using existing CCTVs may not always be ideal to detect and count people accurately due to factors such as camera mounting height, field-of-view and lighting conditions. In this talk, we present our work developing cloud-connected edge AI solutions that count the number of people present in outdoor spaces. This will provide facility operators with the real-time information they need to manage these spaces. We will provide an overview of the system architecture, hardware, algorithms, software and backend monitoring elements of our solution, as well as results from deployments.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

We will be introducing the development journey of docComposer, previously known as ChopChopDoc. docComposer is definitely one of the more agile and bold cross-agency projects we've had so far!

The presentation will be sharing about our onboarding to CStack, and our close collaboration with OGP and GovTech. We would also like to share how CPFB management has given the team the freedom and trust to build these products, giving us the opportunity to innovate not just for CPFB but for WOG too.

Theme: Government Track

The future is increasingly hyper-connected, politically and technologically fractured, and filled with carbon markets. These disruptive trends give rise to new use cases, for example, in healthcare, maritime, and forestry domains. We discuss the new use cases with a combination of digital technologies, such as Data and AI / ML, Cloud, 5G, Satellite Communications, Un-manned Tech, AR/VR/MR/XR, and Cybersecurity.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

My talk will share how we can deploy effective methodologies to generate the next generation of data intelligence and governance.

Theme: Datafication

Government Commercial Cloud (GCC) 1.0 was launched in 2018 as a “wrapper” platform that provides government agencies with a consistent means to adopt commercial cloud solutions. However, feedback received include concerns over the tedious process of onboarding the GCC, increased need for automation, cloud native solutions and for less service requests. The redesigning of GCC gave rise to GCC 2.0 which various refinement from the first version of the platform.

This presentation will share the vision and key benefits of GCC 2.0, and how the design leads to acceleration of service delivery and service improvements for citizens and businesses.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Singaporeans’ love for the internet is undeniable. According to a 2020 study, almost 90% of the population uses the internet, with an average time spent of 8 hours a day. With such a high internet penetration rate, providing a good web browsing experience to consumers is paramount. What are some of the factors contributing to a good digital experience? In terms of usability, the website must be readily available, load quickly and is easily searchable, so as to deliver its intended outcome to users of all demographics and abilities in a simple and efficient manner. At the same time, as we strive towards becoming a more inclusive society, web accessibility is also becoming a major priority, to make sure that a person with disabilities or physical limitations has equal access to the content like the rest of the online community. Over the years, the Whole-of-Government Application Analytics (WOGAA) has developed services to help agencies have a better grasp of how their digital services are performing, as the Singapore government strives towards the Digital Government Blueprint’s goal of becoming a "digital-to-the-core Government that serves with heart". In this presentation, we hope to shed more light on how WOGAA helps to drive agencies to achieve excellence in areas such as usability, digital service availability and web content accessibility. This includes initiatives such as the Digital Service Awards, which provides positive reinforcement to motivate public officers to improve their digital services, as well as the Digital Service Dashboard, incorporating a set of KPIs to nudge agencies to achieve service excellence in areas such as Web Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation. As Steve Jobs once said, "If a user is having a problem, it's our problem." We hope that service owners recognise that usability is a shared responsibility among all stakeholders of a product, and through this presentation, audiences can learn about best practices and gain useful tips on how to better leverage WOGAA to improve their digital services to benefit their end users.

Theme: Government Track

GCC consists of hundreds of accounts and network compartments (VPCs and VNETs) to segment different tenants and applications. This level of scale creates challenges around scalability, security, agility and segregation of traffic between applications in Cloud, and on-premises.

Let's talk about how to design your highly available and secure multi-cloud networking in a large scale deployment!

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Since 2013, Dataiku has been the leader in democratising data and empowering organisation-wide collaboration. In this talk, we will cover how some organisations have grasped and implemented robust analytics and AI programs and realised the full potential from these technologies. We will also share how to integrate data and AI organically throughout the organisation, as well as the importance of governance capabilities at an organisational and individual level. We believe that by allowing everyone to imagine, execute, control, and have governance over their work, data and AI become business assets that propel the company forward.

Theme: Datafication

When we move towards the future of healthcare, the use of digital medicine will be prevalent. Yet, around the globe, most institutions have yet to develop a framework that ensure the digital medicines we prescribe one day will follow the stringent protocol of the pharmaceutical drug approval. In this talk, we will share how we adopt the software as a medical device framework and how we rationalise the cloud infrastructure that enables us to realise a robust and future proof cloud based digital medicine framework.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

With increased digitalisation, more transactions are moving online, be it for commerce, leisure, learning, work or government services. Persons with disabilities will not be able to access important information or perform digital transactions if the content and platforms are not accessible to them. As such, there is an imperative to ensure that digital content and platforms are made accessible to them, especially for critical information and essential services. This session will share about the importance of e-accessibility, and offer tips on how to make your content e-accessible for persons with disabilities as we embark on this Smart City journey.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Join us for an interactive session where we share our journey of setting up the community of Women In (Gov)Tech and learnings along the way. This is not only about women, it is for anyone who is looking to build high performing teams!

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

In the supply chain eco-system there are many vulnerable platforms that are trusted by the majority of developers. These platforms can be exploited in a number of ways by attackers.

In this session we will show just a few of these attack vectors and techniques.

We will examine supply chain vulnerabilities and flaws in three sections: source code management (SCM), package managers, and CI/CD.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Meet CloudSCAPE, GovTech's Cloud Security and Compliance Platform Ecosystem. Join us to find out how CloudSCAPE can help Agencies secure their Cloud deployments on GCC 2.0, and simplify compliance processes through automation!

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

As most of the applications are moving to cloud it is important to find ways to develop cloud applications with agility, reduced cost, and quick time to market with flexibility to change. In this presentation, We will share:
- how we used this method of local cloud development toolkit for building applications in an agile way.
- how we use localstack to overcome development environment requirements in cloud for serverless apps and native services.
- practical experience using such technique for some important apps which changed the course of things during pandemic, allowing faster time to market where speed is everything.
- planning the development blueprint, reference design, cost optimisation areas, opportunities and next steps for future enhancements.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

To fuel pervasive use of service robotics in human spaces, safety and social compliance are necessary considerations. In this talk, we shall share our development journey to endow robots with capability to co-share space with people. We first describe our general safety provisions in conformance to the standards body. Then we shall share snippets in our technical development effort in simulations and prototyping.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

So you’re running microservices in containers? Congratulations! This is an important step towards meeting those business needs around delivering applications to the hands of your customers as soon as possible. When DevOps first made its way into many organisations, It was believed to be a Dev & Ops initiative. Sergiu will explain how the traditional expressions of CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing) are still relevant. How to stay up to date and where you can start on your DevOps Journey here in Singapore.

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

Uncover the technology advancements that secure sensitive and regulated data while it is processed in the cloud, preventing access by cloud providers, administrator and users, and increasing data privacy and security surrounding business and consumer data. Understand how this would help deliver new insights and collaboration by enabling multiparty data analytics and machine learning that combine datasets, while keeping data private among participants. Take advantage of the broad range of confidential compute offerings Azure provides, including hardware, services, SDKs, and deployment tools, as well as confidential computing solutions architectures can be rapidly applied to various use cases across government, financial services and healthcare.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

All projects should be primed for success in analytics right from the start. The data collected from policy implementations, or programme execution should address questions that will help finetune refinements down the road. The data generated from products and platforms should help inform how well it is working, and what new features to build, or what to tweak. But this is often not the reality. We need to do more to reduce analytics debt. Many projects face challenges with analytics downstream, potentially leading to disappointments from both from the business side, as well as the data science practitioners. In this sharing, the speaker will share more about Analytics By Design, which is a methodology that GovTech had mooted, and is piloting internally. Detailed Write-up here: https://go.gov.sg/analytics-by-design.

Theme: Datafication

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare sector has rapidly expanded and has been quick on the uptake of telehealth and other innovative services. Digital identities and the need to verify the authenticity of healthcare records have never been more important in a world that requires trust and identity. Verifiable Credentials (VCs) present a robust mechanism for digital verification, in a way that's seamless, secure and transparent. We discuss a particular implementation, known as OpenAttestation VCs, and how it allows for new innovations in healthcare delivery.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Sharing on lessons learnt/experiences from scaling Agile using Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) at MOM WINS division (in-house Agile development setup).

Theme: Government Track

As cloud adoption within an organisation increases, it is only natural for engineering teams to start adopting more managed services. Over time, as the complexity of the cloud tech stack grows, it becomes increasingly hard, if not impossible, to replicate the production environment on a developer’s device or even in a shared location. At best, organisations maintain a couple of "dev" and "staging" environments that they try to keep as similar to "production" as possible. The challenge imposed by these handfuls of shared environments is that they become bottlenecks to delivery with multiple engineering teams jostling for their use. At Endowus, we went through a similar journey. Thus, in this session, we will share how we overcame this challenge by building an internal service to rapidly provide isolated "production-like" environments that enable parallel testing and deliveries by multiple engineering teams. By combining the power of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with on-demand cloud infrastructure and managed services, we will demonstrate how we manage the lifecycle of these environments exposed through self-service APIs to provide a great platform experience to our development teams. We will also cover how we are now integrating this capability with our automated testing infrastructure to further accelerate our deliveries.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

In an increasingly manpower-lean operating environment, it is essential to design and develop applications that are resilient and minimise manpower efforts to monitor and mediate service interruptions.

Application requirements have changed and escalated drastically over the past decade and more so with the advent of cloud. A fail-safe app development will need to employ techniques and methodology from multiple disciplines.

For example, there is a plethora of different frameworks and approaches to building resilient applications:
1. System Reliability Engineering (SRE). This seeks to take a data-driven approach, with feedback for continuous improvement decisions.
2. DevSecOps with SHIP-HATS. This seeks to have a holistic approach to chain the activities from development, security to operations so that there are no gaps left behind to achieve a quality system that is ‘fail-safe’ to security vulnerability.
3. Architecture approaches such as Reactive architecture seek to be responsive, elastic, resilient, and message-driven.
4. Build compliant and cost-effective solutions by moving up skill levels in cloud adoption maturity with Containerisation, serverless solutions to minimise maintenance overheads, and IaC for automation maximisation.
5. Importantly, how do we align to WOG-level SGTS services, and direction including authentication – WOG AD/AAD/CAM, GTBA.
6. And, there is of course what I would call ‘common sense’ – foundations of computer science that are irrespective of the technologies that will be employed to build resilience of systems; such as the handling distributed transactions, respecting what constitute global state.

In this talk, we seek to un-tangle the different approaches, which are all correct because they come from different stakeholder’s perspective. But how do we tie them together? What are the practical practice-able things that can be done to achieve ‘Fail-safe application development’? This is what this talk will share and will be interesting to seek feedback from practitioners from the audience in the session.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Legged robots are ubiquitous in today's pop culture and are often depicted as having extraordinary capabilities in viral videos. However, adopting them for use in the real world is not as simple. We will share the considerations behind fielding legged robots, and why they are particularly useful in rugged environments.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Come and hear from us on our ups and downs in attempting to shape designs of digital services and products while battling red tape, naysayers and pushing the designs to be future-ready.

Theme: Government Track

More developers are using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools than ever to manage and deploy their resources onto the cloud. While IaC provides a huge array of benefits, there are other longer term considerations that developers should take note of when making use of it to deploy their applications. This session covers some of the mistakes that are commonly made by developers that are just starting out with Terraform, as well as some opinions on what might be better practices for developers who have used Terraform for awhile.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

SHIP-HATS is a continuous integration/continuous delivery component within the Singapore Government Tech Stack, we ensure security and governance guardrails to enable developers to run end to end pipelines, and deliver secure and quality code. With SHIP-HATS 2.0 latest multi-tenanted Gitlab SaaS platform, we provide development tools and environment setup in compliance with AIAS and IM8 policy standards for the whole of government.

Join us as we share what DevSecOps is and how it can be applied on SHIP-HATS 2.0 to help developers automate the entire DevOps lifecycle. Understand how we can achieve pipeline governance and security with the compliance framework, observability and build-in security features. We will also be showcasing a bonus demonstration on how we can leverage Gitlab features to gamify the DevSecOps experience.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

MITRE ATT&CK framework offers a taxonomy that can be used to describe any attack. This is very useful as we discuss the structure of an advanced attack that has multiple stages and is executed over time as a succession of achievement of tactical goals. In our research we notice that adoption of Zero Trust principles (assume breach, explicitly verify, use least privilege, continually assess), orchestrated by DevSecOps, the chances of detecting execution of procedures that employ techniques for carrying out a tactical goal, increase significantly. A study of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) carried out by use of Sunburst, a malware that was employed in the Solarigate attacks, shows that the most relevant zero trust principles whose adoption would help in detecting the TTPs are ‘assume breach’ and ‘continually assess’. Signals generated by activities of threat modeling, SAST, DAST, Pen Testing and additional techniques to observe process level characteristics and communication profiles of workloads during the development phase of the software development lifecycle, allow development of a baseline against which anomalies can be detected via continuous monitoring in runtime during the operational phase of the cycle. Machine Learning assisted contextual analysis of anomalies help identify TTPs and generate a risk score which is used to take an appropriate mitigation action. In our talk we discuss practical ways for leveraging DevSecOps to follow zero trust principles of ‘assume breach’ and ‘continually assess’, in order to detect TTPs thwarting hackers' attempts to reach their tactical goals.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Almost every organisation is going through a rapid digital transformation to serve its customers and stakeholders, while creating efficiencies and cost savings in response to the macro economic environment. A successful digital transformation needs an effective data transformation and data culture to make sense of all the new data being generated. In this session, we will cover what the building blocks of an effective data transformation are that the most successful Fortune 500 companies use across various layers of data infrastructure, tools, people and process.

Theme: Datafication

This lightning talk covers what is the SEED suite and how it secures access to GCC 2.0 and SGTS applications. We will also cover the underlying principle of User Focused Security and the enhancements and developments to the SEED suite components over the past year.

Theme: Government Track

As the world comes out of the pandemic, governments and businesses have been put under great pressure to digitally transform their operations. With this high on the agenda, how can we best leverage the cloud and get ourselves from zero to running in the shortest time? This lightning talk will speak about the challenges and solutions to deliver running applications fast in public sector. Get ready, get set, get stacked up!

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Applications have moved from being traditional monoliths to microservice services driven architecture. Similarly, data platforms are facing that transitional moment and the advent of a distributed data mesh is the data platform or microservices. Originated from Zhamak Dehghani, a ThoughtWorks consultant, a distributed data mesh is a platform architecture that supports distributed, data-specific domains and serves "data-as-a-product" owned and managed by different domain owners. This in turn enables data sharing between different domains across an organization with more feasibility and flexibility.

To build a distributed data mesh, similar to how we build microservices, good DevOps practices must be in place in order to help iterate through changes and deploy updates quickly. For example, how do we efficiently deploy our data code? How do we manage different data environments across domains? Is it possible to create reproducible pipelines and infrastructure through an automated fashion?

We will look at how
a) using a data platform such as Snowflake extends a Data Mesh approach by enabling domains to not only share data as product but also processing logic as product.
b) we embed DevOps tools (such as Jenkin, Terraform) and open source transformation tools (such as DBT and Apache Airflow) to build elastic data pipelines, repeatable infrastructure and scalable data products.
c) governance is enforced within each domain and propagated downstream.

Theme: Datafication

As agencies adopt more digital services as part of their digital transformation efforts, it has become increasingly challenging to discover, onboard and manage the different services separately.

In this session, find out how different teams managing product discoverability, IAM, business and design, have come together to unify the user experience for the different digital services and what its future entails not just for agencies, but participating services as well.

Theme: Government Track

As the millions of dollars lost to scams continue to increase in Singapore, it has become clear that fighting scams is a national issue. To tackle this, a team at Open Government Products (OGP) has built an ecosystem of products to help members of public and government authorities in Singapore to check, report, and block scam messages and calls. During this talk, learn more about how the ScamShield team at OGP is leveraging the power of the community to identify and block scammers while simplifying the workload for police officers in their fight against scams, and how they are continuing to evolve their strategy towards a more holistic approach.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Management insights through real-time dashboards for better visibility into events and metrics.

Measure operations performance for better problem resolution and operations improvement.

Theme: Government Track

Why be satisfied with plain vanilla robots when you can soup them up? We discuss the various ways to enhance a robot's abilities through the integration of novel payloads, and the integration considerations that we need to look out for.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Observability aka o11y (a term derived from Control Theory) encourages developers to create software that pushes out traces and logs, that captures the performance and app behaviour right from development to production. This session shares the benefits and how public sector developers can leverage the Singapore Government Tech Stack to improve observability.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

The contribution of this talk is two-fold:
1) Create a real time dashboard to monitor train platform crowd status.
2) Create a classification model to predict the crowd level of each MRT station.

The multi-classification model is trained using random forest and SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique). We use various types of data including train station information, weather information and train platform crowd levels collected from different data providers such as LTA, NEA and OneMap to monitor MRT platform crowd level in real-time. The monitor system is built on top of a big data framework. Big data ecosystem is established as follows:
1) Apache Flume and Kafka are used to ingest real time data.
2) Spark Streaming reads and processes the streaming data from Kafka and write the processed data into HBase.
3) Spark SQL and Hive are used to transfer data from HBase to MySQL.
4) Tableau is used to create real time dashboard to monitor and visualise MRT platform crowd status.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

A short talk on what Apache Iceberg is, how Cloudera integrated it into our platform and a showcase of main Iceberg features like query time travel, partition evolution and automated table maintenance.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

What is the secret sauce behind high performing engineering teams? Countless books and podcasts have tackled the topic, but the answer is highly subjective and hence remains elusive.

Inspiration usually strikes in the unlikeliest of places. David Chang's memoir - Eat a Peach, is a chronicle of his life as an entrepreneur, restaurateur, chef and media personality. This book was a very inspiring and entertaining read. But, more importantly, it made clear the core principles for building high performing teams, irrespective of whether it's a team of chefs and cooks plating up delicious food meal after meal or a team of engineers deploying code to production every day.

Culture is a hard thing to get right since it's never as simple as following a prescribed set of steps to get the desired result. However, there are some core tenets that are non-negotiable to building high performing engineering teams.

In this talk, I will cover the fundamental principles essential to setting up and nurturing efficient teams, inspired by the book as well as based on my experiences in working with high performing teams in the last few years. There'll be plenty of examples from the world of restaurants and software engineering alike!

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools to increase development velocity to deliver apps. In general, practicing DevOps enables organisations to better serve customers and compete effectively in the market. Infrastructure as Code and release pipelines with CI/CD are two of best practices in DevOps, and considered the best entry for developers who just getting started with DevOps. Join us in this session to understand how we can implement IaC and CI/CD using AWS Cloud Development Kit. We will show you a step-by-step demo to help you get started. After this session, you will understand the overall concept of IaC and CI/CD, AWS services you need to use and developer tools for seamless integration with your development workflow.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

SmartGym is a holistic health and fitness data platform that provides users with fitness insights measured through a series of connected sensors built into gym equipment and health metric measurements. These sensors are currently installed on three types of gym equipment:
1) weight stack machines;
2) treadmills; and
3) weighing machines.

SmartGym equipment is currently deployed in three community gyms across Singapore – Our Tampines Hub, Jurong East and Heartbeat @ Bedok. Personalised Fitness Goal Setting builds on health and fitness data to personalise the recommended workout intensity to the needs of each individual. The users are guided through their workout sessions to achieve their health and fitness goals.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

DevOps has reaped great benefits on project delivery and delivered much business value to users, and this session demystifies and showcases how we can run ShipHat 2.0 on SaaS.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

IRAS has embarked on our cloud native journey, building our core system with predominantly PaaS and SaaS components.

This has helped us move towards:
- shortening the turnaround time to setup systems in the cloud.
- improving availability, maintainability and scalability.
- achieving zero downtime.

However, there were also lessons learnt regarding:
- how infallible are PaaS and SaaS services.
- scaling limits of cloud components.
- etc.

IRAS will share on what we have learnt from our cloud native journey thus far - i.e. things we wish we knew before we embarked on our journey.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Sharing the experiences of setting up projects like GCC 2.0 and SEED, with the need for many different roles for a project to succeed. This talk covers some of the critical common engineering and non-engineering roles that were instrumental during our journey implementing GCC 2.0 and SEED. This session intends to share possible specialties for those who are new to government projects, and hopefully inspires interest for more talents to join us in our journey in designing our imagined futures.

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

In this talk, Samantha will share how her team employs a mix of Environment Branching, Canary and Blue-Green Deployment strategies to achieve a lower cortisol deployment experience.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

As we start increasing adoption of the cloud to unlock infrastructure elasticity and modernize application architectures for scale, this is transforming how your security boundaries are defined and controlled. Changing boundaries require changing approaches in how we secure critical systems and data sources from attackers.

In this session, we will talk about how HashiCorp Vault allows you to achieve a dynamic security posture that is intended to help thwart both external and internal hostile actors. We will also review Vault’s architecture and how it is able to scale to handle trillions of transactions a year.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are like doors that provide access to information and functionality to other systems but they are more than just backend technical implementation. APIs are products for developers that build today’s customer experience and mechanism through which value is increasingly exchanged in digital economies. Within the government, APIs are key in facilitating data exchange, opening up collaboration and innovation across different teams and agencies. Externally, they are enabling our digital economy and driving efficiency for businesses. To realise the value of APIs as accelerators, it is important to adopt an API as a Product mindset – to design and deliver APIs with full lifecycles and long term roadmaps that continue to provide strategic value.

Theme: Government Track

Cloud FinOps involves "cloud financial management discipline and cultural practices that enable organisations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions". Forward-thinking organisations are adopting new cost optimisation techniques that move beyond the traditional to a more automated, intelligent approach that delivers better business outcomes.

In this talk, we will share how we automated the Cloud FinOps across organisations and share real life experiences from large scale cloud operations:
- How to make costs visible and relate them to business needs.
- How to reduce cloud costs while optimising application performance.
- How to leverage automation to save money and reduce time spent managing your cloud spend.
- How to establish a proactive culture around cloud cost monitoring, management, and optimisation.
- How to leverage cloud cost intelligence to make more informed business decisions.
- How to develop benchmarks for cloud forecasting and "Shift-Left" practices on Cloud FinOps.
- How to implement Cloud FinOps maturity assessment.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Let’s automate everything! Sounds familiar? Automation is indeed the fundamental of DevOps to improve software delivery performance across the build, test and deployment stages. However, automation is a double-edged sword, without a proper planning and a well-defined process, the results can be disastrous or there can be no result at all. Developing automation in DevOps is not as straightforward as saying "let’s automate everything" because it may involve different tools and processes for different stages. Although we very much hope that these tools are plug-and-play, there is no one-size-fits-all process so we need a team, typically DevOps/SRE engineers, to develop tool-specific scripts. Why is it so challenging to automate everything despite a strong push for automation in DevOps? Automation development is similar to product development in some ways. Although the goal is to improve software delivery performance, the main beneficiaries are the developers and operations team because it offloads them from repetitive and mundane tasks. So whether the automation eventually gets implemented in production, it really depends on them. If the automation is not going to help them in any ways, you’ll see all your efforts in the bin. Or, if they’re asking for something not realistic, it’s not going to benefit anyone as well so sometimes it’s not because of the technology but the human element that’s hindering the automation development. This is where Design Thinking comes into play. You’ll learn the practical adoption of Design Thinking and how we use it to approach automation development. By the end of the session, we can all call ourselves Automation Designers (if you pay attention and grasp the concept well).

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

SGDex (Singapore Data Exchange), an initiative by GovTech, is a public digital infrastructure hosted on the Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC). SGDex provides a flexible data exchange layer for trusted and seamless multilateral consent-based data sharing between government agencies and private sector organisations. SGDex enables faster development of scalable, secure and resilient sector-level data applications which can leverage standardised data exchange components. As the economy’s pace of digitalisation accelerates, businesses will need to exchange data in a secure manner with each other and the Government to unlock new opportunities. A proper combination of technologies and public-private collaboration is needed to build scalable and secure platforms that perform standards-based data exchanges, and support the automation of the data flow and interoperability between platforms. SGDex currently supports data platforms in the financial services and supply chain sectors, Singapore Financial Data Exchange (SGFinDex) and Singapore Trade Data Exchange (SGTraDex) respectively.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

With the prevalence of high-resolution cameras to enable operations work, organisations are able to derive more insights from video content – from simple detection and alerts, to complex intelligence about behaviours and events. Over time, agencies may implement video systems from different sources that inevitably hamper video access, video sharing and insights generation. In GovTech, we intend to address this problem via Cloud Video Exchange (CVX). We will share our approach for using CVX to empower Government agencies to unify their video systems on a single cloud platform, increasing collaboration and productivity. Together with industry partners, we seek to democratise video content and sharing of insights within and across organisations.

Theme: Datafication

Senior executives in companies need to move away from the belief that cybersecurity issues are relevant only to the IT team. In a world where cybersecurity issues are getting increasingly complex and challenging, this calls for strong leadership right from the top in fostering the security culture of the entire organisation. This presentation looks at the role that Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) play in shaping the security culture in organisations and ensuring security issues are addressed at the right organisational level. Presenter will share on the setup of the community of CISOs across the whole of government and how this network of CISOs forms a core fabric in the Government's cyber defence.

Theme: Government Track

{{I2C}} which, represents Infrastructure-to-Code, is a toolkit developed by the Government Infrastructure Group to enable Agencies to quickly provision cloud resources in a consistent and repeatable manner with minimum effort. It embodies automation best practices to codify existing environments thus supporting use cases such as configuration backup, rapid duplication and recovery of systems, effortless setup of one environment from another – for example setting up a new production environment from an existing UAT environment. Join us to learn more about how {{I2C}} can help you save time and effort while eliminating human error when managing systems and multiple environments in the cloud.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

In 2021, cyber criminals impersonating OCBC Bank through text messages successfully scammed hundreds of Singaporeans of their life savings. In May ‘22, the FBI reported up to $43 billion dollars of business losses to cyber criminals due to similar social engineered attacks between 2016 and 2021. Instead of a spray and pray method where the same attack is sent to multiple users, cyber criminals are now pivoting to highly targeted social engineered attacks. They attempt to gain your trust by impersonating someone you already know or trust - your manager, your colleagues etc. They then aim to trick you into executing the cyber attack, be it running malware, providing your credentials or sending money to a fake bank account. However, legacy security solutions that have defended us against cyber threats are built on brittle rules and threat intelligence feeds - this lends them to perform poorly against these zero day, hyper targeted attacks. In order to solve these emerging threats, one would need a completely new approach - we propose that a behavioral detection engine with modern ML techniques would deliver a solution with both higher recall and precision. In place of building lists of "known bad" entities, we propose first building profiles of what is considered normal within user environments. Machine Learning models trained to detect deviations against this baseline understanding of normality are then capable of differentiating attacker vs safe user behavior with a higher level of accuracy. I am a founding engineer at Abnormal Security, a next-gen Email Security startup. I’ve spent the last four years building this behavioral detection engine that aims to detect all types of malicious emails, especially socially engineered email attacks (e.g. sending a Fake Invoice while impersonating a Vendor). In my proposed talk, I will discuss the unique parameters of modern cybersecurity attacks in relation to machine learning, particularly the adversarial nature of the problem and how it shows up in data and model performance. Using the email security problem as an example, I will then discuss the requirements of a robust threat detection system, describing how both ML and software systems are required to solve cyberthreats in different time horizons. I will then focus on our machine learning stack, discussing how we incorporate the behavioral detection approach with our feature aggregation engine, the various components of ML solution and their various results.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

A Smart Nation is built together with her citizens. However, despite the rapid adoption of technology amongst the people, agencies still find it challenging to engage the nation not only at scale but also in an operationally efficient manner, and harness the power of the collective intelligence of the crowd. From citizens with specialised skill sets to the ideas and feedback of the general public, the citizens of a nation in collaboration with the government presents as an untapped mine of possibilities. Following in the footsteps of successful brands and companies, gamification is a concept that has been used to engage customers and fans on a global scale with much success. Regardless of age, culture or language, play is a term that is widely understood by the crowd and is an effective tool to drive meaningful engagement with an audience. At Crowdtask.sg, we believe that gamification can be the spark that drives the ethos of a more engaged nation. We are excited to share the different ways gamification can help shape the behavior of the nation, where the ultimate goal is to have citizens intrinsically motivated to engage with agencies to build better products and policies. We are also proud to introduce our newly launched platform, which will help push Singapore towards a smarter tomorrow.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

As volume of video data grows, it comes to a point where identifying and categorising videos based on relevant concepts becomes very laborious. With the advancement of AI technology, it is possible for a less labour-intensive method to derive context from videos that can help the retrieval of relevant video content more easily. Govtech’s Video Analytics System (VAS) intends to address this with the implementation of Video Indexer. Powered by Azure Cognitive services, we will share our views and approach of how agencies can adopt AI-enabled computer vision solutions for their use cases, utilising both commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and those built by Govtech’s DSAID-VA team. With VAS as a platform for VA, we intend to bring ease of access to video analytics capabilities across WOG agencies.

Theme: Datafication

What does it truly mean to modernise? In your journey to cloud, you will have some applications you rewrite or refactor into new cloud native workloads. As a developer, you have choices for deployment, including container based platforms based on Kubernetes, Event Driven Architectures with Kafka and Lambda, and many others. With all the architecture options for compute, this session will focus on key pillars for modernisation, including strategies for workloads, automation, DevOps, performance, resiliency, observability, security, and culture.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Even the safest roads have guardrails to keep drivers from falling off the edge. It’s the same with machine learning. A well-designed model, coupled with proper governance, can help prevent unintended outcomes. You need a good mix of people, processes, and technologies to minimise risks when managing your AI projects. In this session, Ted Kwartler will provide some strategies for building good governance processes and tips for monitoring your AI system. He’ll show you how to get started by creating a plan for governance, identifying your existing resources, and where to ask for help.

The audience will learn:
- The importance of context, operations, and development in ML governance.
- How to evaluate diverse types of risk.
- Which industries are experiencing regulatory pressure.
- Tips to deliver value and reduce risk using DataRobot’s technology.

Theme: Datafication

Do you want to better understand what it takes to migrate a critical e-commerce client from a legacy on-premise system to Cloud? Want to learn more about the steps to migrate, its risks/pitfalls and the end to end methodology of one of Singapore's leading e-commerce organisation? I will also touch on the modernisation elements to move from a legacy monolith architecture to a micro services architecture, and the business and end customer benefits.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

enCRYPT is a new one-stop, self-service, central privacy toolkit that helps public sector users apply anonymisation techniques to sensitive datasets, while preserving the data’s value for sharing and analysis.

Find out how enCRYPT can help your agency transform your datasets to meet the new IM8 Anonymisation Guidelines, address re-identification risks, and manage privacy-utility tradeoffs.

Theme: Datafication

Artificial intelligence ("AI") is now a ubiquitous feature in many products we use or processes we interact with, from our mobile phones to our loan applications. With its meteoric rise comes a new set of challenges: AI models have been found to be systematically biased against historically disadvantaged groups, and this is especially problematic for important applications of AI in the space of credit risk ratings, university admissions, and even parole decisions. In this lightning talk, we dive into the emerging field of algorithmic fairness, which focuses on how to incorporate fairness into AI algorithms itself, and highlight the important technical and legal implications it has on AI governance.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Data is the new oil. The more you mine it, the better the results. Information extracted holds the power to unlock new horizons. However, the high value associated with the data comes at a cost, i.e making it vulnerable to external threats. It becomes imperative that the organisations have to spend quality efforts and resources to safeguard this data, be it at rest or in transit.

Various SaaS offerings run into numerous threats that come in different shapes and sizes. More so, if you are into Database and Datawarehouse offerings, that are integrated and managed as part of the Cluster Management. It requires a good amount of expertise wrt tools and utilities of cluster management resources, exposure to a varied degree of integrations and interactions, and familiarity with the nature of threats coming in the form of hacking, intrusion, etc, to be able to safeguard the data.

In this lightning talk, they share their thoughts on the process and steps that will help build/prepare the Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters to be safe and secure, insulating them from external threats.

Some methodologies and measures that strengthen the security aspects are:
- Securing the container images,
- Access control to the source code,
- End point detection and response,
- Vulnerability scanning of endpoints,
- Inventory management,
- Log analysis and SIEM, and
- Pod Security Policies (SCC).

Theme: Building Digital Trust