Cloud Community Debrief - January 2022
Last week, we hosted our first Cloud Community event of 2022 and it was a great success. Our goal is to bring people together who have a shared interest in Cloud & DevOps to collaborate, share ideas and learn from each other.
At Dae.mn, we’re big on social activities (bring on FestDval 22!) and our community events are one way to get our people together. This one was no exception and we had both remote and IRL people join us for a jam-packed couple of hours.
I wanted to share with you a couple of things we did that hopefully will give you an insight into our events at Dae.mn and maybe inspire you if you are organising something similar in your organisation. Feel free to reach out if you want to know more!
AWS re:Invent Recap — Chris Wood @ AWS
As we work towards our AWS Premier Partner status at Dae.mn, we know that it is vital for us to stay up to date with the latest announcements coming out of re:Invent. We invited our AWS Partner Solution Architect along to share with us a recap on the major new announcements as well as to discuss some macro trends that he things we’ll see in 2022.
It was a fascinating talk and as always, I think we were slightly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new features and improvements that were covered, but some took our immediate interest such as:
- Terraform Support for AWS Control Tower
- AWS Karpenter — k8s Autoscaler
- Cloudwatch Real User Monitoring (RUM)
- Direct Connect SiteLink
We’ll be looking at these in the coming weeks as some will no doubt be useful for our clients.
“Research & Demo” (R&D) — Warren Clarke & Pulumi
We’re big on Terraform here at Dae.mn and have a growing number of certified Terraform engineers in our practice. However, that doesn’t prevent us from having a look around at what other tools are available to help us do Infrastructure as Code.
Warren did some research into Pulumi, a framework that allows you to describe infrastructure for any cloud provider using languages such as Python, Node.js and Go.
We saw a few demos that ranged from how infrastructure can be created and managed with Pulumi to how a hybrid Terraform and Pulumi environment might co-exist. It was fascinating to see a new way of thinking around IaC and the tool itself seems very mature and enterprise ready.
Meetups
Meetups…remember those?! I’ve spent many an evening BC (before covid) going along to some very cool offices in London to be plied with free beers and pizza whilst listening to interesting talks by some fantastic people. What’s not to love?
Meetups are a great way to learn new ways of working, validate how you are using tech and network with others in the industry. Unfortunately, I don’t think they have translated well to our new virtual world. I mean, who wants more Zoom meetings?
In our community at Dae.mn, we want to get back to regularly attending meetups in-person as they come back to life this year. We announced a position of Meetup Champion at our event, who is responsible for co-ordinating getting our Daemonites to a variety of events over the next few months. Say hello if you spot us!
Other Stuff
We also shared some internal business activities and updates to keep our people up-to-date in the latest news at Dae.mn. It’s so easy to miss out on this stuff being remote that we’re making a conscious effort to ensure this doesn’t happen. We had a practice update, client update and some discussion around our newly launched certification paths for our Engineers.
For those who made it into the Clubhouse, we even managed to get a few post-event drinks and nibbles in together at a cool local place in Paddington.
All in all, a great day was had by all. Dare I say that it almost felt like we’re back to normal!
Nathan Webster is a Principal Consultant at Dae.mn
