For an event which boasts 24,000 attendees, most things run extremely smoothly. My only real gripes are not being able to get into some sessions as they were full and the length of time it takes to get a cuppa!
Keynote
I skipped the keynote last year as I was keen to get on with some hands on labs. This year I thought I’d find out what it was all about. It took place in the 4000 capacity auditorium, but that was full, so I watched in one of the many smaller theatres. The theatres aren’t exactly small, each one holds more people than the entire nor(DEV):con conference in Norwich. Each is separated by only a curtain and headphones are provided for all attendees - a bit like a silent disco.
I immediately wished I hadn’t bothered with the keynote. Various bits of contemporary dance, some live and some recorded were awful and went on for too long. Despite being set in London the whole feel was very American and this continued throughout.
First up was Alison Kay, VP UK & Ireland, who gave us a general introduction and told us that twelve months on from the Generative AI focussed summit last year, much of it has been put into practice and is making the world a better place. For example Phytoform is using it to solve world food shortages and the Natural History Museum to combat climate change. It was a really positive message, but spoiled by Alison’s poor and awkward delivery.
David Brown, VP of Compute, told us about all the new computing power which is going to be available soon. While it’s exciting that engineers will be able to do more, I think it’s disappointing there isn’t more focus on the efficiency of the software being run, instead of constant calls for MORE POWER! or an explanation of how the power consumption of data centres is going to be reduced.
Rochelle Palmer, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Untold Studios’s delivery was excellent. It was interesting to hear the creative things her company has been doing, especially their involvement with the Crown TV series. One of the things she introduced was the Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance, which will train many students to use AWS technologies to help solve more of the world's problems.
I was very impressed with the NatWest tech team who spoke at the DataDog Summit. They were doing some really cool stuff with Kubernetes and DataDog at the investment bank. It looks like the retail bank is far behind. Scott Marca, Group CIO of NatWest, described new things they were doing that banks such as Monzo have been doing for a long time now.
The Joy of Severless.Net
The community lounge was packed. Even though extra headphones were supplied, there weren’t enough and my only option was to read auto generated subtitles, which meant it was difficult to read the slides at the same time.
Mathew Wilson was really engaging and the talk was excellent. He told us about a client who insisted on them using .Net for a serverless project. .Net is known for having a slow startup time, so isn’t ideal for Lambdas. Mathew told us how they solved this problem with AOT and some of the problems and advantages that came with it.
Good talk, but I think I’ll be sticking with TypeScript.
Everything Everywhere, All at Once: Simplifying the Path to a Greener Grid with Mercury
The Mercury Consortium is creating a way that all smart devices can communicate so that surplus energy can be used rather than lost. For example, when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining and there isn’t enough demand from the grid, it could be used to charge a solar battery in your house or your electric car.
This is a really good idea. The introduction explained the idea really well, but the panel discussion afterwards just reinforced it and described some of the uptake.
Lessons Learnt from Maintaining Serverless Applications
The community lounge was overflowing again and I thought it was going to be another case of reading the subtitles. But when someone left before the start and left their headphones on their chair, I was encouraged by those around me to grab them, which I did! All’s fair in love and war, right?
It turns out Niall Keys works with Mathew Wilson and is also a fantastic speaker. He gave us his 7 tips for maintaining Lambdas in production. I completely failed to take a photograph of the list or to remember 5 of them. One I remembered is to always update your Lambda’s dependencies and runtime as, in some cases, when they are no longer supported Amazon can prevent your Lambda from running. The other was to know your resource limits. For example your step functions might stop if you reach the AWS invocation limit.
Nial was clearly obsessed with Step Functions, which was really infectious and I’ve added them to my list of things to learn more about.
AWS infrastructure as code: A year in review
This was a solid talk about a company’s move from shipping zipped docker images which contained a ruby on rails app, a postgres database and a cache service, to hosting that image on an EC2 instance and then going cloud native. It was a good story and I am sure inspiring for people who haven’t yet made that cloud native leap.
Iceland.co.uk: Boosting Sales with Hyper-Personalized Recommendations
The team from Iceland and AWS gave a good description of how to get personalised recommendations wrong. For example, someone who has just bought a fridge is unlikely to want to buy another anytime soon. This can be improved by taking a customer's previous purchases into account, but also using a little bit of intelligence like suggesting ice cream in summer and soup in winter.
This talk was full of infrastructure diagrams. Who doesn’t love a diagram?! Iceland is using Amazon Personalize which you seem to be able to just throw data into and get good recommendations out of. I was pleased to see the emphasis on measuring the performance of the output.
Amazon Personalize is another thing I'll be looking into in more detail.
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