AWS Community Day 2019 Highlights – Bengaluru Edition
My curation on the AWS Community Day organized by AWS Bengaluru User Group on July 27, 2019.
Why did I decide to go to AWS Community day?
This was the second conference which I attended apart from GIDS which I participated couple of times. I wanted to get a feel of participating in a AWS only conference which is driven by the AWS Community Heros’. I booked the ticket via KonfHub using CodeOps Technologies coupon which came to around ₹1500, which was fair enough.
Sponsor booths
I paid a visit to most of the sponsor booths and had good catch up with developers from some of the tools which I use. Below is my view:
Postman
The booth was open when others were just setting up their stalls. I have been using postman for a really long time and it’s one of those tools which I would install as a pre-requisite when I get a new system to work with.
Post the first booth interactions, I met Abhishek Anand, a subscriber of TechPrimers. We sticked around together for rest of the day.
Jetbrains
What can I say? I have been a fan of IntelliJ IDEA for the last 8 years and I can’t tell the numbers of times I had sold IntelliJ to my colleagues and friends. I even have a playlist dedicated on IntelliJ IDEA Primer. I met Mala Gupta and we briefly spoke about IntelliJ and others tools from Jetbrains.
Hasura
The most impressive tool in the recent times which I admired. It’s an open sourced GraphQL based API translator which can be an abstract layer over your PostgreSQL. I got to know that Hasura can be deployed as a container using their docker image which is totally open sourced.
JFrog
This was the most busiest and the loudest booth. They had good bunch of enthusiastic members in the team and there were event’s and goodies at regular intervals. Their newest product JFrog Pipelines is something we got to see Live!
Alexa Skills Kit
Probably the most popular name in the entire booth list. Spoke with Karthik Ragupathy, Solutions Architect at the Alexa Skills kit team. They launched a new Skill in Alexa where you can talk to Alexa in Hindi. Give it a try if you have one.
Elastic
I have used Elastic Search before even the company created lot of products related to search and rebranded to Elastic. Their newest product App Search is something which I’m going to explore more.
Cloudyuga.guru
Spoke with Neependra, Founder of Cloudyuga.guru on the offerings. They do provide interactive labs with a Kubernetes cluster right in your browser. There are also mock tests if you would like to take them before appearing for the CKA or CKAD certifications from CNCF.
Tensult
Probably the less visited booth as they were a new name and they are consultants for architecting your applications to go to AWS. I liked their “Tensult Cloud Reports” which gave can run reports on our AWS deployment and can tell what’s good and what’s bad — pretty intriguing I would say.
PowerupCloud
Another consulting firm which provides services on Cloud, AI, Data and App Modernization for the Cloud Native ecosystem.
Freshworks
A direct competitor to ServiceNow. One of the most successful Indian startups which has seen huge transition in the Product Support industry. Lot of people queued up to their booths and I could not talk to the Co-Founder who gave a great session which I have covered below.
Topic wise breakdown
Keynote: Embracing Full-stack Serverless. A New Paradigm
Gerard Sans, Developer Advocate, AWS
Gerard Sans’s keynote gave us an evolutionary overview for Serverless and how serverless is heading towards in Full Stack adoption. AWS Amplify is the newest product from Amazon which can make you more productive in creating serverless applications for Web, Mobile, React Native with service integrations at ease.
Tips and Tricks for Running Your SaaS Business on AWS: Lessons Learned from JFrog
Prasanna Raghavendra and Seshu Reddy, JFrog India
Prasanna Raghavendra covered a very wide range of business details on how JFrog is able to provide Multi cloud solution with JFrog’s API driven service. Seshu from their SRE team helped us in understanding the automation and fully automatic and API driven approach taken by JFrog for their customers. A very interactive Q&A based interactions between Prasanna and Seshu stole the show.
Building Voice Enabled Experiences with Alexa
Karthik Ragubathy, Solutions Architect, Alexa Skills kit
Karthik related his real life experiences on how voice enabled devices have changed the way we interact with computer. He also talked about the diversity in the developer ecosystem which has evolved Alexa and its skill till date. Alexa’s latest skill include interacting with it in Hindi!
How Freshworks reduced blast radius and improved uptime at 500k requests per minute
Kiran Darisi, Co-Founder & Distinguished Engineer, FreshWorks
This was one of the best presentation in the event, being a SaaS provider Kiran Darisi covered lot of challenges Freshworks faced when they had to scale with relational database using MySQL. FreshWorks uses RDS MySQL with shards to scale their data and provide seamless experience to their customers. Looking forward for more blogs on their challenges at Freshworks Engineering Blog
Building a search experience live with App Search
Aravind Putrevu, Developer Advocate, Elastic
Aravind Putrevu walked us through Elastic and its evolution as a company and also gave us a demo on App Search, the newest product in the Elastic line-up. In short — it’s your application search engine for customizing your search results (has a decent UI, one feature is you can add custom weightage on search results). Looking forward to explore more on AppSearch.
Lets Talk AI with the Avengers — Building a Conversational AI Assistant with AWS Lambda and Google Home.
Divya Krishnamurthi
I have been trying Google’s DialogFlow for Natural Language Processing for starting a Kubernetes Cluster using Google Assistant (via Google Actions). Divya covered how she has built a Conversational AI using AWS Lambda, DialogFlow and Google Home. She also showcased a live demo by asking Google to describe Avengers characters. My person take away was the Marvel Developers API which has very good documentation and a fun project. If you are a Marvel fan, try it out.
Complex architectures for authentication and authorization on AWS.
Boyan Dimitrov, AWS Community Hero
Boyan covered how we can use roles and policies in AWS. He also touched upon AWS Cognito and how it can scale for organizations with complex roles and authorization architectures. It was a full packed security related talk.
Kubernetes on AWS (using Amazon EKS)
Akash Agarwal, Independent Consultant
This was one of the most awaited topic for discussion. Akash covered the basics of containers, kubernetes and compared EKS, Kops and standalone Kubernetes. However, this was very disappointing as there was no demo and I felt cheated! A kubernetes talk without a demo? Wasted!
Security Best Practices for Kubernetes
Neependra Khare, Founder, Cloudyuga.guru
The best part about this session was the live demo after each best practice (using Roles, Policies, Bindings, Certs, etc.,). Neependra Khare did a great job in creating Cloudyuga.guru and he nailed the best practices with a live kubernetes demo. I got to know lot of new tips and tricks w.r.t. k8s.
Become Thanos of the LambdaLand: Wield all the Infinity Stones.
Srushith Repakula, Head of Engineering, KonfHub
Probably the youngest speaker at the event. Srushith Repakula created a click bait out of the topic and he nailed on the contents. He gave a good overview on the different architectural aspects in introducing Lambads in our architecture. Way to go bud!
Closing note
A new Alexa Skill was developed by one of the AWS UG BLR member (Runcy i think) to pickup a random winner for Alexa echo dot. You need to ask, “Alexa, ask AWS Community Hero to pick a winner” and Alexa would pick a random registrant for the event and calls outs their email id along with their name.
