AWSome Day - AWS Roadshow - Leeds 2016

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The ‘AWSome Day’ is a roadshow for people new to Amazon Web Services Cloud. I am about to change roles to work with customer solutions leveraging Amazon Web Services Cloud rather than VMware private cloud. I’ve just passed the entry level ‘AWS Business Professional’ and ‘AWS Technology Professional’ partner accreditations. I am presently self studying towards the associate level ‘Certified Solutions Archiect’. Certification self study is good but can be a little dry so the offer of having some ‘free’ training and access to some expert solutions architects was very welcome. Having been to various VMware roadshow type events they are also generally a great place to meet similar interested people in the ecosystem.

The day started with a session highlighting how and why customers are using AWS to develop, deploy and operate secure applications and IT services. This session gave various real world customer use case examples and how they have used the AWS services to transform their business. The event then broke into a two tracks one technical and the other business track. I followed the technical track. The technical had various sessions covering the AWS foundational services, EC2, S3, EBS, Glacier, Kinesis, VPC, IAM, RDS and DynamoDB. Once the foundational services had been covered there more sessions covering Elastic Beanstalk, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor. The sessions were delivered by two AWS technical trainers who were supported by two AWS solutions architects to answer questions. The breadth of topics meant the sessions were not deep dives, however the Q&A was lively and it teased out a lot of technical detail. The technical level of the sessions was close to the training materials I have been following for ‘AWS Solutions Architecture – Associate’ certification although not a substitute to my self-study it was useful to take the information from a real trainer and be able to ask questions.

There were vendors sponsoring the day, Alert Logic, Xen, QA and Global Knowledge, I took chance to speak to them all during the time between sessions. Alert Logic provide a managed security operations center type service, we had a great discussion about the different threat vectors used by attackers of AWS solutions and some of the AWS services which provide analytics. Xen are a UK solutions provider who offer Solutions Architect consultancy for businesses moving to AWS, we had a great discussion on the challenges enterprise business face when moving to AWS. QA & Global Knowledge are both training providers who I spoke to about the AWS certification path, most of which I had already found from the AWS website but it was encouraging to hear of the training options available.

In summary the AWSome Day was valuable to me to support my study for upcoming exam but also start exploring the current actual business use cases to AWS service mappings and have dialog with vendors in and around the AWS space. I had a great day at the AWSome Day 2016 and would recomend to anyone starting or thinking about going on an AWS journey.

Introduction & Closing AWSome Day Slides

AWSome Day Technical Track Slides

AWSome Day Business Track Slides