(Original creator: Rachid Siallioui)
Last week I attended, along with a few other Uniface software engineers, the AWSome Day Amsterdam event, organized by Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure services (IaaS). The event was a one-day training in Amsterdam delivered by AWS technical instructors. More than 300 (maybe even 400) people attended the event. It was very crowded, but a very well-organized event.
From Uniface, a few people from the cloud, mobile and security teams attended the event, each with their own project in mind.
The interactive training provided us with a lot of information about cloud deployment, security and usage for the web and mobile environments. The focus was on AWS as a provider of cloud infrastructure services. In a nutshell, technical instructors elaborated on the following:
AWS infrastructure with information about the three main services they offer:
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store objects up to 5 terabyte in multiple buckets. This service includes advanced lifecycle management tools for your files.
- Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) which offers virtual servers as you need. EC2 has advanced security and networking options and tools to manage storage. Also very interesting, you can write your own algorithm to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, to reduce costs and improve your efficiency.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) which provides persistent block-level storage volumes that you can attach to a single EC2 instance. Interesting is that EBS volumes persist independently from running life of an EC2 instance. You can use EBS volumes as primary storage for especially data that requires frequent updates and for throughput-intensive applications that perform continuous disk scans. EBS is flexible, in the sense that you can easily grow volumes.
During the event we discussed extensively the security risks, identity management and access functionalities. But also the usage of different databases (SQL vs NoSQL) together with the cloud services. Interesting topics discussed at the event were concepts such as Auto scaling of EC2 instances, Load Balancing, and management tools such as CloudWatch and AWS Trusted Advisor, which seems to be very useful to track security and costs issues.
In general, the event has broadened my view on cloud deployment using AWS, but also using other cloud infrastructure services as the same concepts can be applied to other cloud providers.
It was truly an AWSome Day in Amsterdam!