For the third time, I had the pleasure of attending the AWS Community Day conference. This is the largest AWS conference in Poland. You can see it perfectly from the fact that the tickets sold out very quickly and some people could not join the event. I think this may also be due to the fact that the conference is still free for participants 🙂
This time the conference was held at the Copernicus Science Center. It is quite an interesting place for this event. Unfortunately, I have the impression that there was a little too little space. This was especially evident at the most crowded lectures and during the breaks.
As for the actual content part. This time the lectures were held in 4 tracks. Interestingly, the vast majority of the speeches were held in English. This shows that the event is already international in scope.
As it happens at conferences, it was necessary to choose the lectures worth attending. Unfortunately, this was quite difficult due to the fact that there were so many interesting topics and speakers!
First on the agenda was the presentation “How to 101: Decommission 5+ year old legacy apps“. Irine Kokilashvili showed the audience how she dealt with cleaning up a long-standing project that had already been abandoned. The work involved identifying the apps and the system, adopting a strategy, designing the cleanup, and implanting the cleanup itself. In doing so, she shared some observations about this work and the pitfalls that arose in the process.
The next prezntation “High Availability in Jenkins Enterprise Deployment – How to keep your CI System Running for >700 App” was led by Piotr Dlugon-Ryba and Nuno Pinto. The main topic was a story related to the preparation of a Jenkins-based CI solution that would high-availability on the AWS cloud. As we know, the basic version of Jenkins does not support high-availability very much, so the solution chosen here was the CloudBees CI-based solution, which provides a lot of solutions supporting this approach. As you can guess, the operation was successful 🙂
The next topic was “Observability on AWS & OpenTelemetry“. Marcin Sodkiewicz in a relatively short session presented the most important information on OpenTelemetry and the integration of this solution with AWS. From the basics like how data is collected and processed from systems to advanced solutions like handling highly distributed environments. In my opinion, it was the most substantive presentation at the entire conference. In addition, I really enjoyed the presentation itself (those animations 🙂 )!
After another break next topic was: “Sky is the limit – Ryanair’s story of customer notifications solution“. Ewelina Kret-Kotas and Dominik Koszkul showed how they approached the preparation of a notification system at Ryanair. The project itself started as a simple proof of concept and then turned into a system, handling thousands of notifications sent through various channels. Existing AWS components such as SQS, Lambda and Event Bridge were used here. And all this at a price of less than $200 per month!
After a very tasty lunch, I visited a presentation titled “Spring cleaning of AWS accounts“. Karolina Boboli showed how to deal with cleaning up AWS accounts where you don’t know what is there and who has access to them. It was a very practical lecture, after which I left with several ideas to implement on my private account.
The last lecture was on “Supercharge Lambda functions with AWS Powertools.” Raphael Manke showed with examples how to extend the capabilities of AWS Lambda functions with AWS powertools. As it turns out, these tools definitely enhance the capabilities of Lambda itself by solving various problems that often arise when creating functions. With each function, Raphael demonstrated how to use it in specific cases.
This year, the team responsible for the AWS Community prepared their stand. It was a good opportunity to meet and talk with other people who also participate in this program. We also managed to take a photo together 🙂
Conferences are, of course, the best time to meet new people and visit other companies’ stands. This year, there were a lot of sponsors’ booths, where you could fish for various gifts.
I also had the pleasure of helping at the booth of my company GFT Poland as a technical consultant. In this way, I had the opportunity to talk with many other conference participants. Courtesy of the company, I was also able to attend the conference itself.
Summary
In my opinion, the conference was once again a success. The large number of participants, very good lectures show that the idea of creating such an event in Poland was a very good idea. It was also surprising how diverse the lectures were. I suspected that there would be many speeches focused on AI. Of course there were a few, but they did not dominate the entire conference. For which, in my opinion, applause is deserved.
Bonus
I contacted Marcin Sodkiewicz after the conference, who, in my opinion, prepared the best presentation. He agreed to share his presentation on my blog. You can find the link to the presentation below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mwm0MtG57doZf4cZ4EUCkq8sOx1fX35D/view?usp=sharing
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