As part of Rocket Software's promise to deliver Modernization without Disruption, our developers actively keep up with the latest technology trends. To that end, we attended the AWS Summit in Amsterdam, one of the largest tech conferences in Amsterdam.
AWS, a cloud computing platform owned and maintained by Amazon, boasts a vast number of tools and technologies implemented under one platform. At the AWS Summit, we saw how people can use the tools to create powerful applications. We also learned how those tools have evolved, including the latest trends.
It comes as no surprise that Amazon's current main focus is Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, they've been focusing on machine learning and Generative A.I., claiming that innovation based on Generative A.I. is transforming industries. And that's not hard to believe, considering we've all had our daily lives impacted by A.I., whether we realize it or not. With their comprehensive toolset, we saw how developers can clean and prepare their data to train models, perform the model training, host, and deploy those models.
At the AWS Summit, we got to experience how modern, large-scale technology can transform large businesses. Two examples were showcased during the Keynote event. One of them comes from Just Eat Takeaway. This company created a large-scale delivery system that, thanks to their scalable AWS implementation, continued to scale without failure, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Efteling, the Netherlands' largest theme park, is the other example. The biggest issue Efteling faces, along with every other popular theme park, is long lines. To solve the issue of long queues, Efteling first built a data lake and a sophisticated pipeline using just AWS tools. They used the data lake as input into their AWS configuration, passing data through the Machine learning platform (Amazon SageMaker Model), subsequently through a scalable RDS (Amazon Aurora), then through a serverless computing service (Amazon Lambda), and finally showing results to the customers' smartphones via Amazon API Gateway. The result? They generated an expectation of the busiest timeslots per attraction, which led to a more even distribution of people per timeslot, meaning that the most popular attractions were less busy during peak times and busier during the rest of the day. This is a perfect example of how A.I. can transform a business, since Efteling managed to increase customer satisfaction ratings by an extra 0.19 on a 1–5 scale.
Amazon CodeWhisperer (Machine learning) and Amazon Bedrock (Generative AI) are two new tools showcased at the Summit. CodeWhisperer, a code generator that provides code recommendations in real time, is a concept that the Uniface development team has been interested in for a while. We believe, for example, that a code generator would be a great addition to the IDE, and we've had discussions on how it can be implemented. Although it's far too early to commit to such tasks, we are always looking into the latest trends in AI, machine learning, and their applications in Uniface.
Internally, the Uniface lab has developed complex pipelines that test the Uniface product extensively prior to every major, minor, and patch release. Thanks to those pipelines, Uniface ensures the highest possible standard of quality to our users, featuring support for multiple platforms and databases. The applications demonstrated at the Summit offer plenty of insight on how we can improve those pipelines with state-of-the-art tooling. Amazon Lambda and SageMaker are great candidates, offering serverless computing and machine learning for data manipulation, allowing us to generate statistics and further enhancing the quality of our final product.
In summary, these events are certainly worth the time and expense, as they help us stay up to date with modern concepts and cutting-edge technologies. Rocket Software's participation in the AWS Summit reaffirms our dedication to staying at the forefront of technology. Our users can already harness the power of AWS through an array of different platforms.