Datamellon & AWS Startups DEVJAM at Lagos Startup Week 2023: A Bird’s-Eye View.

The Datamellon and AWS startups Devjam for the Lagos Startup Week 2023 took place on Saturday 15th July 2023. The team had a long list of valuable activities planned and I must say, it really was a valuable experience.

The program kicked off at around 11am at Datamellon Marquee, Federal Palace Hotel & Casino, V.I. Lagos and I will be sharing some of my key take aways. After the welcome address and opening keynote, the program kicked off with the AWS keynote taken by John Adelana.

AWS Keynote: John Adelana (Senior Solutions Architect AWS)

John spoke about about embracing failure when building and adopting the mindset of building your applications to be resilient in the face of failure. He reiterated the importance of MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), which is the amount of time taken by your application to recover from a failure.
He went on to explain that there are certain essential capabilities in a resilient system which include Anticipating, Monitoring, Responding, and Learning.

Anticipate: Involves coding for failure, Immutable Deployments, Safe deployment with canaries, etc.

Monitor: Involves monitoring the health of your apps, Incorporating your code data, logs, and metrics with customer experience data (as opposed to doing it without the customer experience data), etc.

Respond: He mentioned ML-powered Ops here amongst other things which I forgot to put down.

Learn: Involves correction of errors and gaining insights from past failures.

After the AWS Keynote session, we went straight to a panel session where some startups running on AWS and working with Datamellon spoke about their experience.

Panel Sessions: Success Stories from top startups running on AWS

A few startups that recently (or a little less recently) started migrating to or using AWS and their partners Datamellon were invited to a panel session where they spoke about reasons why they chose to migrate to AWS, or why they decided to start working with Datamellon and what their experiences have been so far. These startups include Fincra, Trove Finance, Payday, etc.
Some of the reasons they stated include acquiring free credits (as expected), efficiency and flexibility of their application, the credibility of partners (Datamellon in this case), ease of scale, cost-effectiveness, resilience, the fact that you can get almost every service you want from the AWS ecosystem, amongst other things. They went on to explain some of the initial services that Datamellon has helped with, like the “Well-Architected Review” where they check if your application is following the best practice, how they can reduce the cost, and how they can make it the best it can be. Datamellon’s availability and large pool of experts to help with their migrations was a great plus according to them and trust me, they had nothing but good things to say.

After this session, there was a break before the technical sessions. Yes, we saw some codes and stuff hahaha.

The technical sessions were split into four:

Data Analytics & AI in the Cloud: Oluwadamilare Oladele (Solutions Architect) & Jamiu Abdulrasaq (Software Engineer)

They spoke about using crawlers on a data pool and drawing insights from that pool to use the insights for product decisions and other things. The interesting thing is that every service needed is available on AWS. Sweet right? It is like your one-stop shop for everything.

Scaling For Success: Omotoyosiola Samson (Solutions Architect) & Sodiq Zubair (Solutions Architect)

The speaker engaged us on how to AMS (AWS Managed Services) with Autoscaling capabilities. The major point stated here was predictive scaling, where the system checks historical data in your application and provisions resources based on this data. This way the resources you might need at certain times are already provisioned with little to no latency. All done by you setting up predictive scaling.

Serverless Computing: Revolutionizing Application Development with AWS Lambda — Akeem Asaolu (Software Engineer) & Femi Nwaosa (Software Engineer)

The speakers spoke about how you can make the best of your application through serverless computing. In this case, you basically replace the traditional servers with something known as AWS lambdas. This I believe is one of the major sellers in cloud computing, so do well to read up on serverless computing. I know I’ll read more about it.

Cloud Security and Compliance: Safeguarding Your AWS Infrastructure — Chimezie Ozuba (Solutions Architect) & Feyijimi Erinle (Software Engineer)

The speakers spoke about securing your infrastructure and explained the “Shared Responsibility Model”, which basically explains that even though AWS has security in place, there are steps you should take yourself to safeguard your infrastructure. Hence both you and AWS are responsible for the security of your infrastructure. They mentioned that AWS has a lot of services that are security-oriented but focused on explaining “AWS Macie”.
AWS Macie works with S3 buckets. Basically, it goes through the data in your bucket and looks for particular patterns you have specified as vital secrets. So when it sees a pattern that matches one or more of your specified secrets, it flags it, sends you a notification, and does other actions you have set. This service does this check even without your input as long as you have set it up. So you don’t even have to know about a security issue, Macie will check it out for you and notify you.

Those are the technical sessions we had, we then moved on to lunch. “Omo” the food was sweet I cannot even lie. I have been looking for where to buy that exact rice ever since then (sobs).

After the break, the last session was funding and credits inclined.

Vaibhar Kinkar (AWS Partner Sales Lead, Startups, EMEA) spoke about two programs that provide funding for startups. The first one is the Startup Migrate Program which is for startups wanting to move their resources from wherever to the AWS ecosystem. They offer cool benefits and funding to make the transition smooth and almost free (if not totally free).

He also mentioned the AWS Jumpstart Program which is a program for startups in AWS already that are using particular technologies in their product. Technologies like IoT, ML, Non-relational DBs, etc. The program involves pairing you up with an AWS partner and providing partial reimbursements for the services used during the building process. Feel free to check out more details on these programs and take advantage of them.

After that Olamide (The Credits madam) came up and spoke about how to get some credits for yourself. You can check this link for more details.

The DevJam was a huge success I would say, even though I did not win anything during the game. At least I got food sha.

I look forward to a more cloud-centric future. Cheers.