AWS Summit Amsterdam 2023 entrance
After an absence of 3 years, AWS was happy to announce that it was reviving its annual real-life conference in Amsterdam. The summit brought industry leaders, cloud enthusiasts and tech idealists together. With a packed schedule of an overwhelming keynote and inspiring sessions, it proved to be a very exciting day. If you want to know more about AWS, from introduction to advanced sessions and topics, then this day is a great opportunity to do so. You will be able to meet all kinds of people: AWS employees, partners, other companies, sponsors and, if you have any questions, you can talk to an AWS expert. An app was available which could be downloaded through the App Store or the Play Store, which contained a detailed schedule about all the sessions taking place that day. It’s a must-have when you’re attending this event.
Keynote
AWS Summit Amsterdam 2023 entrance
The keynote was opened by Marielle Lindgren, who is the General Manager of the Nordics, Baltics and the Benelux of AWS. She gave an explanation of what the day would look like, who is present and what you are able to do on this day at the RAI. The biggest sponsors of the event were named by Marielle and also every sponsor, big or small, was shown in the presentation. She talked about the Benelux and the impact that AWS has on the region and the investments that AWS does in order to be carbon-neutral in the future.
Marielle Lindgren - carbon neutrality
Andy Warfield, the VP & Distinguished Engineer of AWS continued the Keynote and spoke about the newest features and services that AWS has implemented over last year.
Andy Warfield - the newest features and services
Andy also talked about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which is a clear trend in IT and on AWS. Amazon Bedrock, which is presented by Andy, allows you to create generative AI applications by using foundation models. Their main mission, as always, is that clients should be able to focus only on innovation and their applications, and the purpose of them, and not the surrounding infrastructure.
With these kinds of topics, privacy is often a concern. Users want to know how their data is used and what measures are taken to keep it safe. AWS continues to assure that the data of their users remains safe. They always design their newest features and services with privacy as a primary concern, and they will to continue to invest in ways to ensure that they live up to their own standards.
In addition to product announcements, the keynote featured customer success stories, highlighting how organizations from various sectors have leveraged AWS to achieve significant business outcomes. They spoke of companies that had successfully migrated their infrastructure to the cloud.
Some of these companies shared their experience on stage. One of the best examples was the Efteling (an amusement park in The Netherlands), which was presented by Jonas Rietbergen. They added a functionality to their application where they estimate how occupied the park at any point in time. Thanks to these estimations, they were able to predict waiting times and recommend other alternatives in case the current ride was too tied up. Efteling did this by creating a data lake, integrating it with Sagemaker Model and saving predictions every 30 minutes to Aurora. These predictions could then be fetched by Lambda and exposed through API Gateway.
Efteling - predictions explained by Jonas Rietbergen
Other companies were HEMA, PostNL, Epic Games, which were presented by Andy and how these companies used the newest services and features. For example, PostNL was able to speed up the start time of their Lambda’s by 10x by using the Lambda SnapStart feature.
Takeaway (Just Eat) also gave a small presentation on how they use AWS to improve customer experience in their application. Their application needs to be safe, secure, stable and scalable at all times as demand for their application fluctuates throughout the day. Making sure that the application can handle high amounts of load during lunch & dinner times is a top priority, all while making sure that the cost and customer experience stays optimized. This is why Takeaway partnered with AWS as they were able to meet the demands easily.
Sessions
There were sessions throughout the day from both AWS and partners. Community sessions by other partners were mostly held in the community lounge. However, the most interesting sessions by far were the breakout sessions, which were held in the same room as the keynote. There were multiple sessions in the room, so AWS provided headsets to avoid the speakers talking over each other.
The most interesting session for me was the Serverlesspresso talk, presented by Marcia Villalba. Serverlesspresso is a serverless application that handles multiple coffee orders a day from customers. The espresso bar was present at the summit and were able to handle production-like traffic without delay, all thanks to their serverless design and the surrounding architecture. The presenter also gave a breakdown of the cost, where most of the services used were covered by the AWS free tier. Thanks to this presentation, I came across this website where they explain a lot of information, concepts and ideas related to serverless architecture. It’s definitely worth to check it out.
Conclusion
This summit was definitely a fun experience and I will join the edition in Amsterdam next year. If you are near Amsterdam, or want to visit Amsterdam and combine it with the AWS summit, I can highly recommend attending the next edition. See you next year!
