I had the opportunity to attend the AWS Cloud Day event in Melbourne recently, and it was quite an experience. It's great to see AWS hosting an event like this in Melbourne, as we can't keep losing to Sydney for such events. No pun intended :). In this post, I wanted to share my thoughts on the day. I had planned to attend sessions on Resilience and Cost.
The day kicked off with the AWS Keynote, where AWS announced the availability of the Melbourne Region for their customers. It was great to hear about AWS's commitment to investing in the Australia/New Zealand Region for the next five years. The keynote session also featured ANZ and AFL, who shared their success stories of using AWS as their cloud provider. The event's main themes were Resilience, Data, and Generative AI, and it was fascinating to learn about these areas.
After the keynote session, I attended a talk on resilience by Rada Stanic, the AWS Chief Technologist. She built upon the resilience topic discussed in her keynote speech. There were many nuggets in her talk, but the one worth sharing was the Multi-region fundamental considerations that organizations should consider before embarking on a multi-region strategy. They are:
Understand the business impact - Considering the impact when deciding on the implementation strategy is essential. Depending on your RTO/RPO requirements, the approach could range from a basic data backup in another region to a more complex active-active setup. It's worth noting that each option comes with a unique cost.
Understand the dependencies - When designing a multi-region solution, it's essential to consider them. You may encounter a situation where a third-party service you rely on is unavailable in your desired region. This could result in the loss of that service or an impact on latency if it is available in that region. Be sure to take this into account when making decisions about failover.
Understand the data - You need to consider your data consistency requirements. Does it need to be highly available?
Finally, the operational readiness
Other points covered in her talk were around AWS FIS and different design patterns for Multi-region resilience. I am looking forward to using AWS FIS service in our organization.
I was eagerly looking forward to the Cloud Cost session after lunch, but sadly, I couldn't make it. A few of us decided to take advantage of the beautiful sunny weather in Melbourne and head out for a nice lunch break. Regrettably, our meals got delayed and we missed the session. It's disappointing, especially since it was one of the talks I was looking forward to attending.
L-R: Me, Shane Lee, Kien Lee, Ching
The final session of the day that I attended was around Data. The speaker highlighted how numerous companies cannot derive value from their data pipelines and data lakes. She emphasized that it is crucial to identify business opportunities before using data to drive them. The presenter also stressed the significance of pinpointing the business problem you want to solve instead of adopting a "build it, and they will come" mindset. I liked this session as the presenter explained concepts well for anyone to understand.
It was great to catch up with some old acquaintances and friends while I was at the event. During the breaks, I took the opportunity to visit some of the AWS partner booths, which were really interesting. And to top it all off, there was an after-party sponsored by the AWS partners, which was a really fun way to relax after a busy day.
Courtesy of @Daghan Lemi Acay
All in all I had a really good experience at Cloud Day Melbourne and would love to see AWS do more of them in Melbourne in coming years.
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