Elements at the AWS Summit Barcelona
Last Thursday, November 5th, the Palau de Congressos of Barcelona hosted a new edition of the Amazon AWS Summit, welcoming over a thousand developers and other technology specialists. Elements Interactive also attended the event by means of Marc Benet and myself, both Python developers and, every day more and more, related to the world of DevOps and AWS.
TL;DR
- Do not miss the re:Invent conference to get a speed update of the new Amazon Cloud products.
- Building APIs? Check out the new Lambda serverless architecture.
- Make sure to follow Jeff Barr on Twitter (@jeffbarr) and stay connected with the latest info on AWS.
- Handle your load peaks successfully and saving money with AWS Auto Scaling.
- Keep your web services safe with Amazon Inspector and WAF.
- Oh, and look out for any local groups or meetups on Devops or APIs to stay updated and build on the tech community in your area!
The Pre-AWS Summit Meetup
But for us the Amazon Summit started one day earlier, on during Wednesday afternoon, as we attended the API meetup Barcelona event labeled “Pre-AWS Summit API Talks“. There were three talks scheduled about microservices and AWS. As we were registered for AWS Summit the next day, how could we miss it? :)
The meetup couldn’t start better, as the very Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist at Amazon, who was opening the Summit next day, was also giving a lightning talk about microservices at the meetup. As one could expect, in five minutes he gave great pearls of wisdom on the new serverless era, giving a sneak-peek about Amazon Lambda and its goodies for scaling APIs while reducing costs.
Right after the lighting talk, Mark Boyd (freelance writer for ProgrammableWeb and TheNewStack) gave a talk about the opportunities that microservices offer to legacy APIs in SOAP, and how to tackle such a big endeavour the right way. Finally, to conclude the event, Andrzej Jarzyna from 3Scale gave a live demo of how to use Amazon Lambda and the JAWS framework, creating a one-endpoint API with a few commands and one JSON file, and deploying it to Amazon in a matter of minutes. Really impressive!
We left the meetup very excited about the healthy community of meetups in Barcelona (something that Jeff Barr would congratulate on next day in the opening talk of the Summit), as around 100 developers assisted the different talks!
The evolution of AWS
t 9.30am we were at the AWS Summit with our accreditations in hand, and ready to explore the different areas prepared for the visitors. In order to make your life easier, the organization delivered a “Passport” to every one of the assistants, which consisted of a map of the three different floors, a few empty pages for stickers (explained right after) and a few empty pages for taking notes. The great idea of the stickers, which contained a title and a QR code, is to allow the visitors to scan the codes back home, and keep up with more information about the different areas of the venue, as each one of the different areas and sponsors had its own stickers.
Amazon Summit Passport with summit map
Amazon Summit stickers with QR code
Guillem Veiga, Head of AWS Iberia was in charge of speaking the first words, showing the first stats of Amazon in Spain and introducing the first international speaker of the day: Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist of Amazon Web Services (who we had already met the previous day).
Once Jeff Barr started his speech, the event turned in a presentation of the Amazon Web Services evolution. He exposed the fast evolution of the cloud, and how Amazon has adapted their services to that transformation like the animal species adapt to their environment. For example, the last time Jeff Bar visited Barcelona was in 2007, Amazon had three web services and back then they were talking about the cloud as ‘the future’. Nowadays, Amazon has over 50 different cloud services available and we are talking about the cloud as the present; ‘The New Normal’ as it was mentioned in several of the talks.
Right after the cloud review, Jeff Barr continued sharing his wisdom by giving several recommendations of how to get along with the overwhelming variety of web services offered by Amazon which is, according to him, trying the services from Amazon one each time, and specially as you need them.
The last part of the talk was a summary of the last world wide AWS Summit re:Invent held in Las Vegas a few moths ago. He also used the opportunity to show some real world use cases of AWS with Spanish companies during his talk.
Our host proceeded to announce the latest services that Amazon is offering. To name a few: a new streaming engine for S3 and Redshift called Kinesis Firehose, using Amazon Snowball to import data to Amazon S3 by using an encrypted physical hard drive delivered at home), new security improvements and dashboards like the new Inspector, the AWS Web Application Firewall that filters all the malicious traffic automatically or the new Lambda functions (which were already mentioned the day before in the meetup).
At this point, after absorbing all the details of a lot of services and when we thought there was nothing else to add, Jeff started to talk about the next step of Amazon into adapting themselves to the new software trends: software development in containers. During re:Invent, Amazon presented two new services in order to continue on the top of the software development wave: Amazon EC2 Container Registry (store, manage & deploy container images) and Amazon EC2 Container Service (easy launch for multi-container applications), all of them fully-managably by Docker.
AWS security programs
After a generous coffee break we were back in the main auditorium, with our batteries fully loaded, where Bill Murray (not the actor!), manager of security programs in AWS and former FBI worker, was waiting for us to start a talk regarding the security programs that Amazon is applying to their services.
Bill started the presentation introducing several security concepts regarding the software development and the server side maintenance. He made a big difference between security on the server side and on the software side. Amazon takes care of the security of the former one, for instance physical security, or blocking other people accessing your machines through their network, and it does that by being compliant with a wide variety of ISOs. A very good point from Bill was that you can also provide a compliance certificate to your customers just by using Amazon, as that compliance is transferred to you.
Additionally, it provides several services like the Inspector and AWS WAF that allow us to have a customized real-time web filtering, with the possibility of a CloudFront integration.
The security aim of AWS is to provide an easy and transparent security layer to the developer by integrating all the security features on all their services, like simple pop-ups with security tips and information along with complex web malware filters integrated in any Amazon service.
Auto-scaling
Once the security talk ended we had the possibility to choose between different tracks, but we decided to continue with a live demo of auto-scaling. In that quick demo we were able to understand how the auto-scalability works while we were able to see how the person leading the demo was configuring an auto-scalable EC2 server in front of all attendees. From that demo we learned the critical concepts to keep in mind when an auto-scalability rule is configured. For instance, use measurements which decrease with higher amount of machines (for instance average CPU usage), instead of absolute values (amounts of requests), to scale down properly. Furthermore, to make it even more simple, in this live demo not a single line of code was written and everything was set up from the Amazon Console, absolutely amazing!
Technical Bar
Right after all the conferences and live demo detailed before we felt that we needed a more involving experience with the services that Amazon is offering, so before going to have lunch we went to profit from one of the new activities that were offered at this year’s summit, the AWS Technical Bar. This kind of bar (very similar to Apple’s Genius Bar) is run by certified AWS Architects. So, what’s the best way to validate a platform architecture than asking an Amazon certified expert? As soon as an expert was able for us we started to discuss all kind of issues from the conferences and debate about a media delivery service architecture we had in mind, and what the best way would be to implement it using AWS. This was really insightful.
Hands-On Lab
After lunch we were ready to assimilate all the knowledge obtained during the morning, but this time, instead of assisting any of the tracks, we assisted during the rest of the afternoon to the Hands-On Lab provided by Amazon. In there we could complete several AWS seminars in order to practice all the knowledge acquired during the morning and end the summit with a better concept consolidation, for instance using auto-scaling for a website.
Our brain exhaustion reached the climax at the same time as the summit reached the closing time, but luckily for us, Amazon had thought of everything: The day ended in good spirit, with live music and beer to chill out and discussions with some of our colleagues. We’ll be coming back to the next AWS Summit for sure!
Originally published at www.elements.nl on November 10, 2015.
