This year, Nuxeo had the opportunity to attend the AWS Summit 2016 event in New York. The event was a great opportunity for Nuxeo to connect with resources from the AWS community by attending the sponsored workshops and sessions to help those attending learn and continue evolving and transforming the AWS technology and framework; specifically on topics like AWS Lambda, EC2, EBS and Disaster Recovery.
There were approximately 10,000 registered attendees and based on what we saw during the keynote speech, we can safely say that all, if not more, of those 10,000 showed up!
The sessions covered a wide range of topics which were good for those looking for a lot or a little detail. All of the sessions were well attended, provided valuable information and the presenters were always available afterwards for questions.
Here are some highlights from some of the sessions and presentations we attended!
AWS Keynote
Dr. Werner Vogels provided the keynote speech and touched on a number of topics. He spoke about the AWS Summits primary focus on education and the opportunity for AWS users to share information and experiences amongst each other via the Summit. There continues to be tremendous growth with the AWS platform and the community innovations continue to drive those efforts forward.
Dr. Vogels made a great point about experimentation that we enjoyed so much we shared it with those in attendance!
Lyft’s CTO Chris Lambert also talked about Lyft’s explosive growth and their experience leveraging AWS benefits for both peak and non peak volume times. The cloud’s value is equally shared across both use cases; Lyft’s support for a peak usage of 14+ million riders per hour is just as important as supporting and scaling down to support non peak times. The elimination of wait states and removal of waste were also important topics covered during the keynote speeches.
AWS Lambda
The AWS Lambda session was one of the most attended AWS Summit sessions and provided great high and detailed level information on AWS Lambda. They shared example use cases and showed them in action via quick demonstrations. AWS Lambda allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers which can be used within Nuxeo when creating a document from an uploaded blob in AWS S3.
You only pay for the compute time you consume and there is no charge when your code is not running, thereby creating a serverless application.
The Summit session also included a discussion on AWS Lambda authorization options with different input point variations like mobile, websites, and partner services. The session stressed the importance of creating an infrastructure using AWS Lambda that provides users with what they need at the right place, right time, and at the right capacity. All benefits of AWS and Nuxeo!
Other Sessions
We also attended some Deep Dive sessions about EC2 and EBS. For example, one interesting thing about Elastic Block Storage, is that using good old magnetic hard drives (instead of SSDs) for long sequential storage is very, very efficient (SSDs have, by essence, random access). Typical usage of such HDD could be for logging use cases, especially when loading large logs for analytics and streaming.
The HA and Disaster Recovery session was more about general principles, but the final demo was interesting, where from a single device (either Echo - of course, or using AWS IoT), you could be notified of a disaster and recover from it, by simply asking Echo or pushing a button on your device. In all cases, you should always test that your recovery process works. Because,it probably requires root access, but only Bill has root access and he’s in Bermuda!
Post AWS Summit Information
New features and services announced at the AWS Summit 2016
AWS Summit 2016 Keynote Speech
What’s Next!
We had a great time attending the AWS Summit and look forward to attending and potentially sponsoring or speaking at future AWS Summit events. Nuxeo is continuing to expand our knowledge of the cloud to build better products for our customers and want to share this information with the larger AWS community and more specifically our current and future customers. We encourage you to reach out to us for any questions on Nuxeo’s use of AWS!