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Thoughts from the DevOps world

AWSome Day Bucharest 2016

2 min read Dan architecture aws companies

Note: You can find my comments on the similar event held in 2015 here.

Another year, another AWS event. The venue changed and more speakers were brought in, but unfortunately they were of lower quality than Sebastien Stormacq, the sole speaker in 2015. Registration doubled this year, with roughly 500 people queuing for the early-morning check-in.

Introduction slide from the event

Two Tracks

The biggest change from last year was that the content was split into two tracks, a “technical” room and a “business” room, each with their own focus.

Technical track topics:

  • Storage and content delivery (S3, CloudFront)
  • Compute and networking (EC2, VPC)
  • Managed services and databases (RDS)
  • Elasticity and management services (ELB)

Business track topics (centered on the benefits of moving to the Cloud, such as flexibility and cost savings):

  • Benefits of Cloud Computing and defining a Cloud Strategy
  • AWS Security
  • Cloud Economics (TCO)
  • AWS partner programs

Business track slide

My Experience in the Business Track

I have attended the Business Track because I already knew the presented technical content well enough (I’m AWS CSA(A) certified), so my choice came down to curiosity. This led to a couple of unsettling observations.

1. Very low interest in the business track. Business attendees were outnumbered by technical ones by more than 15 to 1. Beyond the small turnout, the lack of engagement was obvious: many people were on their phones (possibly answering e-mails), and very few questions were asked at the end of each session. One attendee in my row, dressed in a full suit and tie, simply fell asleep.

2. No apparent plans for a nearby Edge Location. Amazon doesn’t seem in a hurry to expand its offering by opening an Edge Location closer, latency-wise, to Eastern (South-Eastern) Europe. Serving presentation content from 60-80 ms away may not be a problem, but moving internal real-time applications to the Cloud with that latency could make the user experience worse than a previous local data center solution, even if the Cloud is better on reliability and cost.

Conclusion

Until these two issues are somehow fixed, AWS technical expertise in my country will continue to be sold by the hour to external customers.