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Thoughts from the DevOps world

AWSome Day Bucharest 2015

2 min read Dan architecture aws companies

Less than a month ago, I attended an Amazon event called “AWSome Day”. It was far from boring, and it clearly reflected the company’s image: polished, sophisticated and focused on the customer.

AWSome Day 2015

The day had two parts. The first was lighter and business-oriented, while the second, after lunch, went deeper into the technical side. Still, it’s worth remembering one thing: when a product costs you nothing (or appears to), you are the product.

Amazon covered the venue, the talks, lunch and refreshments, and in return delivered what amounted to a very classy sales pitch.

The services covered in depth, or shown in the hands-on demo, were:

Other services were mentioned only briefly:

All in all, it was a packed day. The complete presentation is on SlideShare (link) if you’d like to go through it again. Many slides were skipped because of time constraints, and the deck seems to describe even more AWS products.

When thinking about the Cloud, and Amazon Web Services in particular, there are a few important points to keep in mind. As a product suite, AWS is a couple of years ahead of its competitors in terms of features and interface. Note, however, that there is competition: several companies offer similar services, sometimes at a lower price or with better cost efficiency than Amazon.

In my opinion, AWS is the right choice for:

  • Experiments, test deployments and temporary solutions;
  • Non-production environments whose lifespan and makeup keep changing (e.g. development and/or QA);
  • Unusually heavy loads lasting only a few days a year (e.g. traffic peaks on Black Friday or during Christmas sales);
  • Medium- and long-term data storage (backups).

If your environment is fixed and won’t change or scale significantly for a year or more (e.g. a production website and/or a SaaS product), AWS may not be the only cost-effective option to consider.

Conclusion: if a similar event is held near you, go and reserve your seat! Just remember that you are attending a sales pitch.