AWS GameDay: F1 League EMEA Final
On the 18th October 2022, Cazoo’s very own Adrien Baron, Ben Emery,
and Richard Owen teamed up and competed in the AWS F1 Gameday Finale. Before we get to how they were placed on the day, you may be wondering how they got to this point. It all started back in April when Cazoo’s platforming team went to the AWS Summit, Richard got the team together and competed in the AWS regional competition. They only had 1 hour to complete the tasks and managed to bring home the gold! Which brings us back to the finale, where the team competed against 7 other teams worldwide.AWS GameDay is a team-based interactive learning exercise that allows participants to put their AWS skills to the test in a real-world, gamified, risk-free environment. It is a hands-on opportunity for technical professionals to learn about AWS services, architecture patterns, best practices, and group collaboration. Participants in this F1-themed version of AWS GameDay must help support their fictional F1 team in overcoming real-life challenges using resources provided by F1 in live AWS accounts.
The team was given five different exercises to complete, the overall objective was to create a functional F1 dashboard during the live finals. Due to the time constraint, the team had to work quickly and carefully to complete the tasks and decided it was best to divide the team in half and play to everyone’s strengths. They had to complete tasks such as bringing in security for the media distribution and making a fully functioning F1 dashboard, with video footage.
Cazoo represented the United Kingdom in the finals, competing against six other teams from around the world, including France, Israel, Germany, Sweden, and Spain. Senior Developer for the UK/Ireland, Matheus Guimaraes travelled to Cazoo’s London headquarters to host the live stream. In total the team had to complete 5 quests, including the Keep Your Eyes On The Road video stream quest, Facing the Challenge with Clean Data — Data Import quest, Brain (data) and Eyes (video) still need a backbone — Backend quest, Here is My Pit-Lane Dashboard — Frontend quest and the Secure It! — Security quest. After an hour of suspense awaiting the final result, Cazoo finished in third place.
After interviewing one of the team members, it was found that the event was able to bring people from different teams together and also helped them consider different things, like using different AWS tools and working on things like video streaming. Other exciting events at Cazoo recently are the internal Hackathon that took place on 15th — 16th November 2022 which you can read more about in the next Cazoo tech newsletter later this month.
Gameday is an interactive event, letting teams utilise their AWS skills for solving gamified real-world problems.
After winning the AWS summit gameday, Cazoo went on to come third out of over 340 teams that participated — very impressive stuff. Congrats team and well done for representing Cazoo!
- Steve Wilcock, the Group Engineering Director
We are all so proud of the team and cannot wait for the next event!
If you want to see more, take a look at the live finals stream on Twitch
