Taking the stage throughout June 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted free online virtual summits to explore the latest their cloud platform has to offer. Delivering a series of talks to both prospective customers and existing users, AWS provides an excellent summary on their key objective:
These virtual events are designed to educate you about AWS products and services and help you develop the skills needed to build, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications.
Not only does AWS explore a wealth of services at our disposal, but they also cover in great detail their best practices for security, testing, and deployment. Living within the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region, I attended my “local” online summit on June 17th, where best practices proved particularly insightful to build on my existing knowledge of AWS services. Here I outline my highlights from the summit.
Summit Format
The full EMEA summit lasted five hours, from 9am BST (UTC+1) until 2pm. The agenda for the day was broken down into four key segments. First we were provided with a local welcome talk, in my case concentrating on Ireland and the UK. This covered two fields of particular interest: health and renewable energy, which will be discussed in greater detail shortly.
We then regrouped with the wider EMEA audience to hear an opening keynote by AWS’ CTO, Werver Vogels. Actively tweeting and contributing to his own blog, All Things Distributed, Werner shares a range of AWS success stories. In particular, he talks about DynamoDB — conceptualised in the Dynamo Paper before becoming the popular NoSQL data store it is today — as well as community platform Nextdoor, which is hosted on AWS.
Filling the majority of the time during this summit were the breakout sessions. Typically lasting 30–45 minutes, there were five breakout slots on offer, each delivering an abundance of talks tailored to specific roles — DevOps, Security, and prospective customers, to name a few — as well varying levels of cloud expertise. These sessions were graded like US course numbering systems, starting at 100 for introductory talks, working up in multiples of 100 to 400, which represented talks targeted at technical experts.
Source: aws.amazon.com
Finally, the summit wrapped up with closing remarks by AWS CEO Andy Jassy. Reflecting on the benefits that AWS brings under these unprecedented times — supporting businesses working from home whilst they shield from Covid-19 — Andy outlines his expectations for AWS in the years ahead: anticipating greater uptake of the cloud whilst more people work from home.
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