Throwback – AWS Tech Community Days Summit, Cologne

For the first time ever the largest and most technical gathering of the German AWS community took place in Cologne. Cloud and software experts from all over Germany shared their experiences and best practices on how to use AWS in the best possible ways. Nordcloud, as an AWS Premier Partner, recognises the value and importance of this kind of event and participated with a team of experts, whilst supporting the event as a Gold Sponsor. The AWS tech community talks were categorised into four key areas: Cloud Software Architecture, DevOps, Big Data & AI ('Streaming & Freeform), and Containers ('Kubernetes'). This enabled experts to participate by talking about any of the topics in the context of real-life projects or theoretical work. This meant there was a daily activity composed of four talks running in parallel, which gave attendees the opportunity to switch between the four tracks based on their interests. Between each talk, there were opportunities to mingle with other attendees which provided a great networking platform and chance to talk about challenges that the speaker had discussed.

Lessons Learned

We were able to take away some nuggets of information home with us from the event. Here are our lessons learned:

Containers Kubernetes

Although the talks were mostly from independent speakers from different companies, most of them were attempting to solve or were challenged with similar problems when using Kubernetes. The challenge was the difficulty in finding an efficient and highly available Kubernetes solution in AWS. We hope in the future AWS will address this during the upcoming re:Invent in Las Vegas this November. We will have our team on the ground there to make sure the word is spread quickly.

Cloud Software Architecture

In this track, we had the chance to hear about a variety of different topics. One of the most exciting ones was about 'how to achieve 'more security with serverless', where there was a lot of discussion about how to properly secure today's most commonly used serverless solution setup, which includes API Getaway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3. We had the chance to see some best practices and real use cases from different industries.

Streaming and Freeform

In this track, we learned how to manage PostgreSQL RDS in order to store several customers without impacting query performance, whilst enabling blue-green deployment. We also discovered how to build a cost-effective and scalable infrastructure for handling near-real-time ingestion and analytics of large quantities of sensor data based on Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, and Redshift services.

Upcoming AWS Transformation Day in Cologne

Looking for other ways to add value to your business? This AWS Transformation Day in Cologne brings together enterprises that have already harnessed the advantages of the cloud to share and discuss with their peers about leveraging the potential of the Cloud. Get more information and register for free here.