AWS Summit London 2019 recap

This week saw an even bigger and brighter AWS Summit London than ever before. A rumoured 12,000 - 15,000 people attended, and Cloudsoft were there to soak up the latest in all things AWS in the UK.

What were the key takeaways, and what resources are available to catch up on-demand?

Some companies are making BIG savings in the cloud with serverless

There was an amazing customer story from non-profit Comic Relief who showed how they'd reduce their monthly AWS spend from $83,908 in March 2015 to $5,393 in March 2019.

What an incredible effort by the team! Truly awe-inspiring. But this just shows what can happen if you continuously optimize and evolve your applications on AWS to exploit the pace of innovation they bring.

Serverless is not new anymore and it's one of the key reasons Comic Relief made these savings.

It's hard for me to believe sometimes, as a 25 year veteran of the technology industry, that a market leader like AWS is introducing innovations that reduce it's customers' spend in such drastic ways. Normally the leader is lazy and expensive with a captive market: AWS have turned things upside down - and it's great for business!

The question is: can other organizations repeat the cost optimization success of Comic Relief?

One way to find out is to get a Well-Architected Review from Cloudsoft. We are one of the few UK Advanced AWS Consulting Partners that are also officially approved Well-Architected partners. We'll send our professionally certified AWS consultants to work with your team to optimize your applications on AWS for operations, security, resilience, performance and cost.

Learn more and contact us for a friendly chat about how Well-Architected can help your business.

AWS Summits are well attended for a reason: learning by sharing and networking

One look at the agenda for AWS Summit London tells you all about the purpose and intent from AWS: helping everyone do better on AWS by sharing knowledge in an actionable way. From customer stories to level 400 deep-dive technology sessions, there's something for everyone.

Some of our favourites:

• Choosing the right database for your workload (did you know AWS have seven different database types and your application might use one, two or all seven!)
• Cloud governance and provisioning using AWS management tools and AWS Service Catalog - this is crucial to stop getting burned through inappropriate usage, whether it's hackers launching x1 instances in regions you don't use, to eliminating the friction for non-technical users to consume applications via a user-friendly catalog.
• CI/CD on AWS - this is something we're seeing more and more with Cloudsoft customers. How to build and manage a release pipeline, a powerful improvement to any business. We can help with your DevOps.

AWS is powering disruptive businesses across the UK and Ireland

Whether it's Comic Relief and their drastic cost optimizations or Monzo and it's fintech trailblazing, AWS is behind (or underneath!) companies that are not just taking themselves to the next level, but they are also showing the UK in it's best light- in troubling times! - as a global centre for innovation.

Contact us for a chat about how you could exploit AWS to meet or even transform your business objectives.

And that's the most exciting thing for us at Cloudsoft - as an AWS partner we get to work on some really cool projects with very clever people and it helps us all spring out of bed on a morning, even in the May showers that accompanied the summit!