Amazon Web Services

At the end of last month we had the opportunity to go an event organised by Amazon focused on its AWS web services offering, something which is a pivotal aspect of our technology platform. Amazon put on a very well organised event with a seamless flow through from pre-registration support to post event networking.

As well as the conference sessions, the event also included an exhibition space with different partners and service providers showcasing their offerings. Some of the stands we visited included:

• Amazon Payments: Currently supporting 3 different currencies, they are soon to roll out more multinational features, with the added benefit that the speed of transactions is also improved when compared  with more traditional models
• Cloudability: A cloud cost management services provider which includes a very useful feature for calculating the cost of instance-level  requirements. The technology then compares this with usage to provide optimal purchasing recommendations through its Reserved Instance Planner tool.  
• Datapipe: A managed service providing tools, optimisation and analytics for database management and cost control in AWS cloud environments. The service includes numerous interesting features such as proactive cloud analysis and also includes a good support function. 

After this we visited the ‘Hands On’ lab provided by QA, which reminded Daniel, our newest Senior Java Developer, of his university study days due to the room being full of people feverishly working away on their computers!  These free and paid Amazon AWS training services are provided by qwikLABS and looked to be both well-prepared and very useful for anyone looking to improve their AWS skillset. A full list of those available can be found on the Amazon AWS site here.

Next up were the break-out sessions with different options for different levels of expertise, but we found that the knowledge levels required meant we could flit between both high and mid level technical sessions with ease. The ones we attended were:

• Maximising EC2 and Elastic Block Store Performance.  An advanced technical session for those looking to maximise the performance of AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage to support workloads with demanding IO performance requirements. 
• Dynamic Content Acceleration: Lightning Fast WebApps.  A mid-level technical session to learn more about improving the performance of web sites and web applications using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Router 53. 
• Scaling on AWS for the First 10 Million Users.  A mid-level technical session providing an overview of the techniques that are used to build high-scalabilty applications on AWS. 

Following the conference sessions, we then had the opportunity to chat with other attendees about their own businesses and technologies while enjoying some nibbles and drinks. We’d like to thank Amazon and all the team that collaborated on such an interesting, productive event for their user communities.

Taking the time to take a step back from the day-to-day workings of a busy, bustling business such as ours has helped us explore and learn more about other ways to deploy AWS and engage with some interesting third party services that we will be looking to roll into our offering later on in the year.