Introduction

During this year’s keynote, the main focus was on the velocity companies - and especially start-ups - need in order to bring their products to the market, highlighting the importance of agility. I was particularly surprised to learn that Flixbus is fully managing their infrastructure in AWS, showcasing the power and potential of cloud technologies. It’s impressive to see how Flixbus has invested in their tech stack, especially during the pandemic when travel was at an all-time low.

As with any start-up, challenges such as speed, regulatory compliance, costs, and growth can pose significant obstacles. However, with the right mindset and strategy, start-ups can overcome these challenges and battle prove their products on the market. The ability to move quickly while still being compliant to regulations, minimizing costs, and driving sustainable growth is key to success in today’s fast-paced market.

Attended talks

PAS216: Overcoming Cloud Security Challenges at Scale

Summary

For the Security team it’s crucial to be aware of the challenges that come with migrating to the cloud. While it can be beneficial to move to the cloud, there are still certain challenges that need to be taken into consideration. It’s important for organizations to grow with the technology as well. To manage these challenges, having the right tool(s) is necessary. In selecting a tool suite, it’s critical to make sure that it aligns with the needs of both developers and the organization as a whole as everyone sits in the same boat. In this presentation, the author mainly talked how ORCA Security was able to solve their security problems.

Notes

COM204: Building Infrastructure AWS CDK vs Terraform

Summary

The ongoing “CDK vs. Terraform” controversy is deemed to be a highly debated topic among IT professionals. Though the writer was known to be a fan of Terraform, she now showed its main pain points and highlighted some solutions with CDK. The author believes that most DevOps professionals opt for Terraform due to its ease of use as it doesn’t require any programming knowledge, and it is considered one of the best frameworks for coding infrastructure. However, the often mentioned multi-cloud argument as deploying the same Terraform stack to another cloud provider is not an easy task. Additionally there are major differences in the state management of both solutions, and it’s crucial to consider distinct approaches for the safe and reliable deployment of infrastructure components.

Notes

STP204: Web3 - Build, launch and scale your Web3 startup on AWS ft. 1inch

Summary

Tim Berger from AWS highlighted what is necessary in order to interact with a blockchain. With blockchain technology gaining significant traction, Tim emphasized the importance of understanding the fundamentals of blockchain interaction in order to take full advantage of its potential.

Furthermore, Tim also showcased some sample architectures where Amazon Managed Blockchain service has been successfully implemented. The audience gained insights into the various use cases of the service and how it can be integrated with other AWS products to achieve a seamless blockchain experience.

In addition to Tim’s presentation, Sergej Kunz, the co-founder of 1inch, also gave an exciting talk on how he and his team use AWS services for providing web3 based applications.

Also have a look at

Open Datasets

ARC304: Reactive Architecture on AWS: from 0 to 1.6M events/minute

Reactive systems

First of all some introductory words about reactive systems. As stated in the Reactive Manifesto today’s user expectations have changed dramatically over the past years. Users expect applications to be responsive (response time measured in miliseconds) and software developers hope their system will be resilient enough to cope with failures in an elegant way rather than full disaster.

The manifesto emphasized the important of building software that can easily adapt to changes in user demand, system loads and failure conditions. And all this has to be taken into consideration while still remaining flexible and scalable enough to handle future growth and evolution.

Reactive systems are:

Bitpanda Pro

Bitpanda Pro is a trading platform that allow users to trade digital assets (such as cryptocurrencies) but also metals against fiat currencies such as EUR, USD, GBP. The platform offers various trading tools such as charts, advanced order types, real-time data and access to liquidity providers.

In this talk Bitpanda talks about their reactive architecture and how they managed to setup their infrastructure accordingly. Impressive enough was also the fact they’ve managed to server 1.6m events / minute!

Notes

Fun stuff

serverlesspresso

The serverlesspresso application is a serverless coffee bar exibit, first seen at AWS re:Invent 2021. I had the chance to see and also try it in Berlin 😎.

Serverless application

Ordering

The result ☕

The architecture