Exploring Singapore’s Tech Landscape at GovTech STACK Conference 2024

I recently visited Singapore for the first time, and it was an incredible experience. I didn’t know much about the country, its developer community, or the AI landscape there. However I was invited to deliver a 3-hour workshop on Docker 101 on Day 0 of the GovTech STACK Conference 2024, so I got to dive right into Singapore’s thriving tech scene.

GovTech STACK Conference 2024: A Unique Developer Event

GovTech Singapore’s STACK Developer Conference is unlike any other developer event I’ve attended. It’s one of Singapore’s largest tech conferences and one of the few government-led developer events worldwide. This conference showcases Singapore’s digital capabilities and highlights the pivotal role of developers in Singapore’s journey toward becoming a digital government.

Singapore’s Vision for a Digital Government

The STACK 2024 keynote speakers set the stage by emphasizing the critical role developers play in building Singapore’s digital government. This year, Singapore ranked third globally in the United Nations E-Government Survey, a testament to its commitment to digital transformation. The conference also provided a sneak peek into Singapore’s Smart Nation 2.0 vision. This initiative focuses on creating a digitally trusted society, boosting economic growth, and building stronger communities, all while tackling new online challenges.

Pioneering AI in Government

Another exciting theme at STACK 2024 was Singapore’s push to integrate AI into government functions. In his opening speech, GovTech Singapore’s Chief Executive, Goh Wei Boon, discussed their ambitious plans to introduce AI-powered code assistants for government developers, aimed at boosting productivity. This aligns with recent findings from Stack Overflow’s 2024 survey, which shows 72% of developers view AI coding tools positively and don’t see them as a threat to their jobs.

The Singapore Tech Stack: Building Fast, Building Smart

One of the standout features of Singapore’s digital government strategy is the Singapore Tech Stack—a set of reusable components that helps developers build applications quickly and efficiently. A great example is MyInfo, a secure service that allows residents to access and manage personal data and auto-fill forms. Thanks to the Tech Stack, MyInfo was developed in just four months. Another example is GovWallet, which provides a seamless experience for residents to access government payouts across different platforms.

At the heart of this tech ecosystem is the Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC), which enables the government to adapt and scale rapidly. Singapore has already migrated 80% of eligible systems to GCC, a remarkable achievement that makes it one of the most successful government cloud migrations globally.

Exploring GovTech’s Product Booths

After my Docker workshop for around 40 attendees, I had the chance to explore some fascinating booths showcasing GovTech’s products. Here are some of the highlights:

Government on Commerical Cloud

GCC is a platform that helps Singapore government agencies quickly and securely adopt commercial cloud solutions like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. GCC 2.0 has streamlined onboarding that lets users get started within an hour through their TechPass account.

GCC 2.0 adopts a Policy-as-Code (PaC) approach, ensuring that all resources undergo automatic compliance checks by default. Compliance checks are performed in real-time to identify potential security vulnerabilities as soon as they arise.

This version of GCC emphasizes a “light-touch” approach for cloud-native solutions, using native tools like AWS Config to maintain continuous compliance. By embedding policies as code, GCC 2.0 minimizes latency in security assessments, allowing faster evaluation of cloud workloads’ compliance states and early detection of configuration changes. This proactive approach supports secure and efficient cloud operations for government agencies.

AISAY

AISAY is an AI document reader capable of extracting information from various document types—handwritten notes, printed articles, and more. Unlike traditional OCR, AISAY handles unstructured data, multilingual text, and images, providing structured responses for documents from local entities.

GovText

GovText is a text analytics tool that uses NLP to help government agencies analyze and interpret unstructured data, improving data processing and operational efficiency. The GovText Web Portal offers two types of summarisation:

• Abstractive summarization (Normal mode) - The key points of an article are paraphrased into a short and coherent paragraph, by a language model pre-trained on news articles and open datasets.
• Extractive summarization (Quick mode) - The most important sentences from an article are compiled to form a summary. While this approach does not involve paraphrasing, it offers faster processing speed.

CloudSCAPE

This platform helps government agencies maintain security compliance for systems hosted on GCC. It includes automatic scans to alert administrators when security baselines aren’t met.

With over 70 agencies onboarded, this platform provides automated daily scanning of GCC 2.0 cloud resources for compliance with Singapore Government IM8.

CStack

CStack integrates with agile development tools to make it easier for teams to modernize applications without worrying about infrastructure complexities. It supports deployment on both internet and intranet environments.

CStack meets the Singapore Government’s Application Infrastructure Architecture Standard (AIAS) and IM8 requirements. It utilises a default tiered architecture (web, app, data) and adheres to relevant policies for infrastructure, applications, and containers. By using CStack, you will streamline compliance audits for these areas and save time in the process.

With CStack, you can deploy your applications on either the internet or intranet. Using CStack GEN routable clusters, you can enable end users to access your applications by whitelisting your egress firewalls to the platform ingress.

Sentinel

I simply love this booth. Sentinel is a collection of LLM guardrail filters to detect unsafe or irrelevant content. With Sentinel, developers can block or adjust such content before it reaches the LLM or is returned to the users.

Docker DevTools : GenAI Meetup at AWS Office

This event marked a significant milestone for me as it was my first time conducting an event in Singapore. Having no prior knowledge of the local developer community or the AI landscape in the region, I was eager to dive in and connect with fellow tech enthusiasts.

Thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for providing such a wonderful venue, we were able to host a highly engaging and interactive session. The event brought together developers and AI experts to explore the latest innovations in generative AI, Docker, and cloud technologies.

Chomchana (Chom) Trevai, Ph.D. kickstarted the event and talked about Building Serverless Generative AI application on AWS.

Next, I delivered a talk on Build and Deploy AI-powered Apps locally using GenAI Stack. Showcased a couple of demo on building a Streamlit application using LangChain, Neo4j and Ollama.

The next speaker, Elliott Chong , an AI/ML Hackathon winner talked about the recent enhancement with Dionysus - A Powerful Platform for Streamlined Developer Collaboration.

Next, Ivan Tang delivered his talk on Milvus and Zilliz Cloud. Milvus is a cloud-native vector database for next-generation AI applications.

Finally, Michael Yuan joined us for US virtually and talked for 25 min on a title "Portable AI application in Docker across CPUs and GPU".

It was an exciting experience to see so many enthusiastic participants come together, share ideas, and learn about building serverless AI applications, deploying AI-powered apps locally, and exploring the future of AI with Docker. The diverse discussions, coupled with valuable insights from industry leaders, made this event truly special.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to be part of this vibrant tech community in Singapore, and I look forward to more such events where we can continue to learn, collaborate, and innovate together!

A Memorable Conference Experience

GovTech Singapore STACK 2024 was a surge of new knowledge, networking, and exploration. From the fourteen product showcases and over 40 lightning talks to keynotes and panel discussions, it was packed with opportunities to learn and connect. I left Singapore with a deeper understanding of its tech landscape and a strong appreciation for the innovative work happening in the government sector.

If you ever get the chance to attend STACK, don’t miss it! It’s an event that truly brings together technology, innovation, and community in a way that’s uniquely Singapore.