Amazon Web Services (AWS) kicked off its annual global summit series with its very first virtual summit, the AWS Summit Online – EMEA on 17 June. The first of its kind for AWS, the virtual event attracted thousands of online delegates from the cloud computing and developer community at large. The aim of the event was to provide a platform to connect, collaborate, and learn about the AWS cloud. It consisted of a variety of sessions which dived deep in into getting started on the cloud, building advanced architectures, app development, DevOps and more.
More than ever, cloud technology has become a highly prized business continuity enabler. With 2020 being a markedly different year in which the COVID-19 pandemic caused disruption, we have seen how the cloud has been a silver lining powering the future as businesses’ most critical digital assets can be made available at any time for access from anywhere.
Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels gave the opening keynote address. In light of the unprecedented current events which have impacted millions of people and businesses around the world, Vogels focused on key topics which were practical and timely for businesses to be able to use to sharpen their skills and strengthen their core businesses in the coming months as they navigate the new norm whilst leveraging cloud computing technologies.
AWS has built and launched hundreds of cloud services over the past 14 years, becoming one of the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. Along this journey, many key lessons have been observed working alongside a wide range of customers who use AWS services. As such, the keynote address touched on the fundamentals of good cloud design.
Foundational fundamentals
The building of technology solutions was likened to the construction of a building structure. Without a solid foundation to begin with, that causes structural problems that undermine the integrity and function of the building in the long term. Likewise, “You have to focus on these core concepts in order to build stable, secure, efficient systems. And whether it is new workloads that are being built, or maybe you’re migrating existing workloads, it is critical that you are architecting properly from the beginning,” said Vogels.
Amazon Builders’ Library and the Well-Architected Framework
Delegates were advised to go back to the fundamentals and use frameworks like the Amazon Builders’ Library and the Well-Architected Framework when piecing together technologies, as these assets are available to help build, deploy and operate virtually anything and at any scale on AWS. These resources are free for those using the technology.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps people understand the pros and cons of decisions while building systems on AWS and what the architectural best practices are for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud.
The Amazon Builders’ Library is a collection of articles that take readers under the hood of how Amazon architects, releases, and operates the software underpinning Amazon.com and AWS.
Industry zoom-in
With cloud adoption at an all-time high, demand for scaling capabilities was unprecedented. A remote-based workforce and scores of people on lockdown led to an uptake in the utilisation of digital technologies and consumption more than ever before.
In this regard, video streaming services were highlighted as an industry that experienced a boom in the past couple of months as time spent streaming video went up by 40% worldwide. In the US, more than 161 billion minutes were spent streaming video in mid-March. This figure increased from 17 million minutes in the previous year. The world’s leading streaming services rely on AWS.
Even from a content generation perspective the various types of content generates multiple petabytes in size, data which needs to be transferred, processed, and stored. The fact that it begins in the production stage requiring different creatives to play a part in making the final product, the back and forth sharing of the petabytes of raw footage was cumbersome as teams had to mail back and forth tapes, before the cloud. This exposes that the true business collaboration is really difficult to do when shared resources are not accessible to everybody. And it’s more than just collaboration software or business productivity applications that need to be truly collaborative. The back and core assets need to be accessible to anyone that needs them, anywhere where they are.
