Yesterday I attended the AWS Enterprise Summit in London. I've already written about how it was very poor, from a diversity perspective. But, it wasn't all bad: some of the content was rather good...

All hail the snail

The first customer presentation was given by John O'Donovan of the Financial Times. He told a fascinating and engaging story of the changing world in which they found themselves: with print distribution in decline, they needed to refocus on the net — and on future platforms and devices yet to come, whatever they are. John's presentation was had a great balance of information, insight, and humour.

A particular highlight for me — and by the reaction from the audience, I'm going to guess for many other engineers in the audience — was Chaos Snail. “Like Chaos Monkey, but more chilled”, its job is to slow down I/O on certain instances, to test how software reacts to such degraded conditions. I asked John later if this tool has already been, or will be, open sourced — he says they've had a few requests for this, so yes they will. Good news!

John also talked about Tagbot, which locates and terminates untagged instances (“My team loves turning stuff off”, he said). Sounds like a blend between Chaos Monkey and Conformity Monkey.

Maximum support

After lunch we heard from Brent Jaye, VP of AWS Support. He emphasised the value of Trusted Advisor as a way of identifying problems, and how they're keen on building quick fix facilities into the web console. (For example: if a volume hasn't been backed up for a long time, then highlight this as a potential problem, and show a “backup” button right there).

“We're in the business of you spending less money with us”, he said — which has a nice ring to it.

Brent also spoke of the value of integrating AWS and the customer's support system together; and of using Trusted Advisor and AWS Support not just via the console, but by their respective APIs. (John O'Donovan would I'm sure agree: earlier on he said “We don't buy a product unless it has an API”. +1 on that).

Finally Brent spoke of the importance of engaging with AWS Support early, not just when there's a problem.

Auntie adapts

Next up, Robert Shield from BBC iPlayer spoke about Video Factory: how it uses AWS, the benefits realised over the previous platform, and how the BBC's Operations function has adapted with the use of the cloud.

(I work with Robert, on the same team — I presented the Video Factory story to the AWS UK User Group last month. So of course it should be assumed that I'm biased :-) )

However, it was obvious that the audience enjoyed it: Rob talked of the benefits of smaller, simpler components; of how much data Video Factory shifts into S3 every day; and on the importance of automation and consistency.

By re-architecting for smaller, simpler, more easily understandable components, he said, each part also became more reliable, and thus people were more willing to look after the system.

News from the cloud

The last customer presentation was from Chris Birch of News UK. Like John and Robert before him, Chris told an entertaining and engaging story.

Much of News UK's business is about Sunday publications, and combined with their “paywall” (he didn't call it that, but that's what the rest of us know it as), this meant that their traffic is highly spiked around Sunday mornings. And the old system could handle only 17 transactions per second! But of course things were much faster on the cloud.

Part of Chris' talk was about the importance and the difficulty of assessing the Total Cost of Ownership — needed to be able to make the business case for moving to the cloud. One thing I found very interesting was the idea that an application's “App Book” (documentation on what it is, etc) should also document the app's TCO.

There was also a nice section where Chris said that 48% of their instances had no tags, so it wasn't clear what the instances were doing. However Chris also said that “It's really boring switching stuff off”, which I have to say I completely disagree with!

The two-pizza team

Two of the speakers (sorry, I forget which ones exactly) mentioned the idea of the “two-pizza team”. Basically: a team which requires more than two pizzas will have communication problems. I like this concept — it's a good rule of thumb that definitely matches my own experience.

And the others…

You may notice that I only wrote about four of the ten speakers. That's because the other speakers very much failed to hold my attention. I enjoyed the customer talks, all of which were interesting, and engaging, and got a great reaction from the audience; but the talks from the partners, and from Amazon themselves (with the exception of Brent), seemed to be aimed very much at CxO level — at “suits”, one might say — and as such really weren't my thing at all.

So I saw it as a summit of two opposing audiences: CxO versus techies. If the event was larger, then it would make more sense to split into two events, or two tracks in one event.

As it is, it seems to me that most people would have found half of the talks less than engaging — but, it's only a one-day event, so that's not such a burden.

Wrapping up

Overall I really enjoyed the day — the CxO-style talks weren't for me, and I didn't explore the partner and sponsor stands; but the customer presentations were great, and I had a good chat or two with AWS staff, and I loved swapping stories with the other attendees.

Oh, and there was highly practical swag!

I think I'll be back — maybe not every time, but it was a good day, and I'd be happy to do it again sometime. See you there!