AWS Global Summits are events organized by Amazon. The idea is to bring the AWS cloud community together and help them bring up to speed with what AWS has been working on.
Every year, there are a bunch of these events organized in cities around the world. The one we went to from FourCo happened in Brussels, Belgium!
Everyone is talking about Sustainability
The overarching theme this year was Sustainability in the Cloud. There is a significant focus on the topic both in terms of what AWS is doing in the sustainability area and what AWS recommends its customers to do to reach their own sustainability goals.
Sustainability is not just another side topic anymore. It is now one of the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected framework. With AWS provided tools, you can now set sustainability goals, measure the impact and take measure to reduce the impact and reach sustainability goals.
The AWS shared responsibility model also applies to environmental sustainability and AWS provides you with best practices to minimize the impact due to your workloads and resource utilization.
The key areas you could apply best practices for minimizing impact include
- Data design & Usage
- Software application design
- Platform deployments and scaling
- Data storage
- Code efficiency
- Utilization and Scaling
Customers can now get their hands on a variety of sustainability tools to help with their sustainability initiatives.
A few interesting sessions
There were some really interesting sessions. We witnessed reinforcement learning in the form of AWS DeepRacer and we even tried our hands at the fully autonomous racing simulator.
The keynote touched upon a few interesting topics like how Covid accelerated the digital transformation, how AWS and the world is impacted by whats going on in Ukraine and topics related to sustainability. However, the talks themselves left something to be desired.
There were also routine talks about big AWS customers describing their digital transformation most of which were fairly generic and somewhat uninteresting.
I personally found the session on AWS geo-coding and location services really interesting.
There were also swags, a few drinks and bites in the evening at the end of the summit.
A significant demand for a physical event
This was the first of the AWS Summit events scheduled in Europe this year. There were so many people that turned up for the event that Amazon had to stop letting people inside the summit location a couple of hours after the event began.
A lot of people turned up not just because it was one of the first big technical events to take place this year, but also because it was a great reason to hang out with their teams, meet people in the community – in other words it was also a great social gathering!
Also a great team venture!
Attending the summit gave us an opportunity to travel together as a team, have some team time for ourselves, talk about technology, cloud and coding.
It was not all work, we also had a nice walk in Brussels and dinner the day before the summit. And even when it was work, it did not feel like work at all!
It also provided us with an opportunity to meet other people in the Cloud community, exchange ideas and have fun learning and brain storming.
