AWS Enterprise Summit, London, July 2016.

I was in two minds about going to the AWS Enterprise Summit. But I was I glad I did. If you're going to go to any conference??? ??and you're interested in doing technology better??? ??go to an AWS Summit. (Even if you use another cloud, like Azure or Skyscape, still go you'll learn a lot that's highly relevant to your business). I work for a company, Kainos, that designs, builds and runs 'stuff' in the cloud. We're independent when it comes to the platforms and tools we use. That's because all we care about is that our customers get the best outcomes. So when I go to a conference that's all I'm really interested in. The reason I was in two minds to go to this event was because I attended a large security conference recently. I was there for two days and got very little out of it. At the end of it - with the exception of a very helpful conversation with one Protective Monitoring supplier, Assuria I have to admit I didn't feel much wiser about keeping my customers' data safe (maybe it was just me). In comparison, the AWS Summit was excellent. When I go round the exhibitor stands I'm not interested in picking up the freebies. I want to hear about the problems the exhibitors solve. I am always interested in anything or anyone who can help me monitor, protect and alert, create real logs, enforce real security, meet compliance, maximise availability and performance, increase speed of delivery, and reduce costs (phew!). The vast majority of the exhibitors were highly relevant to the cloud and my world. Obviously Amazon are on the sales pitch (business is business) but there were also some great customer testimonies from FT, KPMG, SGN (we're proud to have SGN as a customer) and others, all of whom described themselves as 'risk averse' organisations who were now sold on the cloud. For me, it's the messages about cloud computing's benefits that count. Here's some snippets (forgive me??? ??can't remember necessarily who said what): - In a moment of clarity, I realised this cloud thing is inevitable. - Use the cloud to spend time obsessing over your customers instead of obsessing over your infrastructure. - Infrastructure taking the lion's share of investment in an organisation makes no sense. - Projects take a long time when infrastructure is on the critical path. Cloud removes this almost completely. - Once you have educated your risk teams, they are more happy using cloud than not using it. - Using the cloud allows us to achieve much more security than we can with in-house systems. - Avoid 9 months infrastructure build, processes etc. by using the cloud. - Business far more adoptive of cloud than IT who can feel it as a threat. - Really important when you use cloud. Be able to 'id' costs Use tagging. - Amazon believes the recoup of costs to migrate to cloud is achieved in 5.5 months on average. Our staple activities of agile development and WebOps automation got plenty of attention. And there was a cracking story about UEFA's 2016 song by David Guetta, which was delivered using serverless computing with AWS Lambda and incurred less cost than I did in buying my tickets for the Euros! There was a lot more than this; but this blog won't do it justice. My advice is to get yourself off to the next one. Next time I intend to sponsor, exhibit and present??? ??and bring as many technical and business people from Kainos as I can. Oh, and about the freebies. I couldn't resist??? ??I succumbed to one Bluetooth speaker and a cuddly pig (I had to run for the train before the free beer :-)).