Back from AWS Summit Singapore

About this conference:

AWS Summits are free, one-day events hosted in 12 major cities around the world. These events are designed to provide developers and technical leaders with an introduction to the AWS Cloud and guidance on architecture and engineering best practices. Whether you are new to the cloud or an experienced user, you will learn something new at the AWS Summit.

Schedules:

The conference has three main activities going around:

1. Hands-on lab: give you an opportunity to experience with AWS use cases in a live AWS environment.
2. Presentations: the presentations are separated into three different tracks:
• Business transformation track: why business should choose AWS to save money, how you could transform you existing business to AWS
• Technical track: why technicians should choose AWS to save time, an introduction of AWS system.
• Public sector track: A showcase of different companies using AWS.
3. Q&A sessions to ask about different questions.

For me, I attended the Technical track after break-out session and try a little bit of hands-on lab. The whole conference I believe is more IDC related, and more of an advertising and marketing event of AWS. The presentations are pretty general, not of much detail.

Notes for the presentations:

1. Why choose Cloud:
• Elast Capacity (Can use whatever you want)
• Cloud can lower down the expenses for maintain the product (pay only what you use, add or remove servers on demand) and do innovative experiment (remove test servers if the experience is not successful).
• Easy to scale up and down, no need to guess capacity. (you can add or remove servers at any time)
• Dynamically improved speed and agility.
• Go global in minutes. (AWS has 40 ZONES including Singapore around the world. if you host your service on AWS and you decide to copy the service to another ZONE, it’s easy and fast)
2. Why choose AWS:
• Easy to use and fast (a click of button to do a lot of things.)
• Frequently update and can use a variety of technology. (different language, different databases and different structure)
• Secure. (AWS has a range of different security services for you to choose and adapt)
• Global and large scale. (Easy for you to scale up the service)
3. Then the presentation goes to details about some of the features and services:
• Introduction to E2. For more details http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
• How to choose databases: SQL or non-SQL. And introduction to different DB system in AWS. more info: http://aws.amazon.com/running_databases/
• How you should design your structure on AWS: for more details: http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
• Big-data on AWS. (More DI related.): more details http://aws.amazon.com/big-data/
4. There is also a list of presentations from different companies on how AWS has helped their business. (Not of much importance)

I found a video of AWS Summit in NYC this year, because for Singapore it’s not uploaded yet, but they are more or less the same. If you are interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo1W92Teqx4.

Final Suggestion

From my own perspective, AWS has a concrete, complete and stable system. It’s really suitable for all types of business. Apparently, there are way lot of advantages of using AWS over do-it-yourself. They also provide a solution for business to transform from existing services to AWS without any problem.

However, if you use a hybrid system with both your own server and AWS, it will become a bit difficult to manage. Furthermore, if you choose to use AWS, it will be difficult for you to come back. So I suggest if you want to transfer you business there, better think twice before really get hands on it. And if you already choose to use it, you should completely transform the business.

Categories: Programming Guide