As a data analytics firm, we understand the value of the cloud for data storage and processing. When we talk about cloud computing, we are very passionate about Amazon Web Services since it is a very rich platform that enables us to build our applications for various use-cases. We were curious to understand AWS and gain an insight into best practices and this led us to the annual AWS Summit at Mumbai. The AWS Summit is a one day cloud community event organized in 12 major cities around the world. The focus of the current event was on cost effectiveness, high availability, big data and security.
The keynote was delivered by Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com where he talked about how AWS helps developers focus on the application rather than the infrastructure.
A range of breakout sessions were attended by team Tatvic.
In the Startup and Developer Track, one of the speakers talked about the four stages of a startup development lifecycle namely: Idea, MVP (Minimum Viable Product), Scale and Profitability. These ideas were inspired by Steve Blank’s book: The Four Steps to Epiphany. He also mentioned how a startup can effectively use AWS as they pass through each of these stages.
One of the other sessions that we found very useful was the Big Data Analytics session. Abhishek Sinha, Head of Big Data and Compute, spoke about how running Analytics on the cloud could be extremely effective since it was Elastic and scalable. Data objects could either reside in S3 or if in a database layer like DynamoDB. The data processing can be carried out on an EC2 instance or on a distributed Hadoop cluster with the use of Elastic Map Reduce. Finally, the processed results can be pushed back to S3, DynamoDB or Redshift. Whats more to this is that this entire process of Data collection, Computation and Storage can be automated with the help of Data Pipeline. Interesting !
The keynote and breakout talks left us with an even better sense of what AWS is about, how it has grown, what kinds of customers are using it, and what it can do.
Update – The videos from the AWS Summits held around the world can be found in this Youtube playlist
