Posted by: Dean Lewis,
I had the privilege of representing Cabinet Office Digital at AWS
re:Invent.
On arriving at the Conference, I was shocked at the sheer size
and scale. This year was AWS’s largest ever re:Invent Conference
with over 50,000 participants in person and many more online.
Covering multiple hotel locations and a wide range of topics this
gave engineers a chance to learn from one another, In a
variety of different ways. Through tech talks and ad-hoc
sessions this event offered a good opportunity to gain insights
and best practice from industry leaders.
The conference opened with a Keynote Speech with Peter DeSantis
who shared the new products across storage / networking and
compute.
Knowledge and Learning provided by AWS spanned many different
disciplines so every night I took time to select a list of
sessions that I feel could return benefits to the work we do at
the Cabinet Office.
Presentations and seminars were high quality with 2600 different
workshops / seminars there was something for everyone from
Broadcasting to Telecoms, From Software to DevOps.
Government is currently undergoing several transformation
projects so it’s at events like these where we can learn from
industry leaders that we can ensure we are providing the best
value for the general public.
Below are some products, sessions and keynotes that I found
particularly interesting.
Lambda Snap start
Several departments across government use Java and so the release
of Lambda SnapStart will be a potential game changer here.
Enabling faster cold starts could not only save money by enabling
machines to be turned off but also increase performance when
systems need to scale. This ability should result in cost
savings over the long term.
Cloud Security
At Cabinet Office Digital keeping our platforms secure is a
priority. And at AWS re:Invent security featured big.
One major product was Amazon launching Amazon Security Lake which
is a new service that enables organisations to aggregate logs and
events from multiple sources and enable quick analysis and
respond to threats more effectively.
Pizza Slice Teams
One particular session I attended was on Pizza Slice Teams at
Amazon. This is the idea that teams should be only small
enough that they could be fed by just two pizzas. This
leads to increased innovation as each team may produce multiple
similar outputs but reduces the amount of ‘meetings’ and overhead
allowing each team to focus on its output individually.
This enables faster-to-market products but through time
ultimately converge. This enables teams to work faster in a
more agile fashion.
Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD)
One of the most exciting announcements at AWS was the Elastic
Network Adapter / ENA Express that uses the Scalable Reliable
Datagram this can be used within virtual networks. This
protocol is able to push 25Gbps over a traditional TCP flow which
reduces latency. The consumers on the SRD side are able to
reassemble packets (packet reordering) and so doing this in
parallel across the network increases overall performance.
What this means is that by utilising ENA some applications can
gain a performance boost especially those that shift large
amounts of data between two systems. This could result in
faster load times of pages and applications.
Excited to use the learnings...
Every session at AWS re:Invent challenged me in a new and
exciting way and I want to say thanks to all the people I have
met over the 5 days who gave me new and powerful insights and I
hope to apply these within CO Digital through our Transformation
agenda.
