AWS Summit London 2017

The sign up experience this year was not great. I never received the confirmation email but when I chased them up directly learned that yes, I was actually registered to attend. The day before I had to chase them up twice to get the QR code required to register in the morning, it eventually came through at 8pm. At registration though, the code didn’t work so I had to line up at the help desk where I did eventually get my pass and in the gates just in time for the keynote.

Besides registration the rest of the event was run as professionally as you’d expect and there was a good range of talks to choose from. This was the first time I’ve been to an AWS event after having completed some of the certifications and the main thing I found was that I was much better off focusing on the talks that covered areas new to me, as otherwise even the “deep dives” weren’t telling me much knew.

Quick summary of the talks I did attend:

Keynote

The keynote by Werner was as good as ever. I enjoyed the Ocado part in particular, the robotic grid system they have is really impressive.

Secruity

I didn’t stick around for all of this and much of what I heard I’ve already read in AWS white papers. Amazon continue to drive home how important this is, both in making sure your own solutions use best practices and in the level they go to secure their own infrastructure and the offerings they provide to make using AWS services as secure as possible.

Deep Dive on Microservices and Docker

This was a really enjoyable talk, nothing new or eye opening in terms of what AWS are offering but will delivered.

Serverless Application Development

I like this stuff and the talk covered a lot of stuff. API Gateway, Dynamo DB, Lambda, there’s a lot of things you can do with these technologies and other AWS offerings.

Deep Dive on AWS IoT

This was bordering on being a bit too much for me. There was a lot of detail about connection types and how they’re secured. I’m still getting my head around the high level concept of AWS IoT and how exactly you make use of it and Greengrass adds another level to that allowing you to run everything at the edge.

Launchpad

This talk wasn’t the right choice for me. The description lead to me think that Amazon offered more of a generic platform for startups but Launchpad is only for those offering hardware and selling it through Amazon.com. It’s a fine initiative, offering marketing and sales help to startups but, you need a physical product ready for production in the next 30 days.

All in all it was another great event highlighting the opportunities that are out there and the tools that are available.