Bonjour à tous !
The french guy from Outlnadish is back with a new blog which isn’t the first one I wrote about AWS. For those who don’t know what it is, in a few words, it’s a cloud computing platform, if you want to learn about it, you can start for free by clicking on this link and if you wish to go further, you can even become AWS certified.
As we use AWS at Outlandish and the fact that I enjoyed the AWS Summit earlier this year, I thought it would be interesting for me to go to the free AWS 101 Event that took place the 30th of September at Euston Square.
The day
During the morning there was an introduction to AWS and in the afternoon a DevOps presentation.
They gave some examples of companies using their platform:
I was thinking about Outlandish being one part of this list so that we tell people how we use AWS, but for that we would need to be more familiar with it in order to take over the world one day perhaps.
I love when they give examples, the one I kept in mind was to do with games (of course). It was Call of Duty MW3 that simulated 2.5 million users traffic with EC2 instances before launching the game to know whether they could handle that much connections at the same time, rather than buying a super powerful computer that would have cost much more.
Even companies like JustEat were there telling how they use AWS, and I had a chat with somoene there who told me that they always like to focus on how others use there cloud infrastructure rather than them talking all day about what they provide like their 30 services.
Some useful tips and tricks
If you do some coding and/or use AWS you might want to have quick look at these techniques/tools :
Techniques/Tips
- Version control everything
- Commit early and often
- Automate your deployments
- Use EC2 tags
- Automated testing
- Put alarms in cloudformation
- Cloud watch
- Cloud watch Logs
- Decentralize your monitoring
- Log Lines
Tools
Q&A
This was a great moment to ask questions to experts with a cup of tea.
I met a nice guy who works at AWS with whom I spoke about Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI & CD) which we are currently trying out using PHPUnit tests and Selenium.
He told me about Jenkins (a CI tool) aswell as AWS Activate.
Feedback
My feedack on this day was that there were no real indication to go there a part from the address, putting a wifi hot spot would have been great, but the most important was that we couldn’t do any practicals, there were no session to make developers meet companies, difficult to talk with other people, only experts…
Globally, it was a good experience even though there were some drawbacks, because I’ve learned stuff that I ignored before.
You can find the introduction slide aswell as many others, and if you are interested in learning more about AWS and want to be part of one of these check out this link.