AWS APN Ambassador Global Summit Wrap Up

Cevo is an AWS Advanced Tier consulting partner and currently has two consultants within the exclusive AWS Partner Network Ambassador Program. This program provides exclusive access to AWS service teams and roadmap details under NDA.

This year, AWS organised the first ever Ambassador Global Summit for the top 50 partner ambassadors to talk about specific roadmap items around various AWS services.

THE AMBASSADORS

Cevo prides itself on “the hive mind” – the concept that a Cevo customer is not only leveraging on the skills, capabilities and values of a person working on a client site, but they have access to the entire Cevo community. The Ambassador community has a strangely similar philosophy of collaboration – AWS experts in different locations working for different, yet occasionally competing businesses, helping each other produce high quality AWS patterns and solutions the entire community can benefit from.

THE GLOBAL SUMMIT

While a lot of the content in the summit was under NDA, I can share some of the themes of the talks and details that are already in the public domain.

DOCUMENTDB DEEP DIVE

The Product Manager and Solutions Architect talked in detail about the benefits of DocumentDB – which is ‘somewhat’ a drop in replacement for MongoDB. It’s MongoDB 3.6 compatible minus a few things like geospatial indexes. It should be a good solution for a cloud migration that have an on-prem MongoDB deployment.

HANDS ON WITH SECURITY HUB

Later in the day we did a hands on deep dive into Security Hub. I do think this is one of the best things AWS have shipped over the past year; the idea of an extensible single pane of glass for the security posture of an organisation.

The lab was largely around building CloudWatch Event rules from AWS config to trigger lambdas to do stuff. The example being to security group firewall an instance that was launched with a non-blessed AMI. Additionally within the lab we built out a notification and alerting workflow against a guardduty heuristic greater than x. (e.g. the environment has been compromised).

AWS CLOUD MAP / AWS APP MESH

We then moved onto parts of the container roadmap with a talk on Cloud Map and App Mesh. Cloud Map provides the service discovery capability for the container solutions in AWS, and App Mesh provides a service proxy solution based on Envoy to build in the fault tolerance logic that is needed in complex microservice topologies. I cannot share details given the content was mostly around roadmap, though I do think the ECS/EKS with Cloud Map / App Mesh are going to be key parts of the modern toolchain very soon.

ADRIAN COCKCROFT AND CHAOS ENGINEERING

While 80% of the content was based on roadmap and AWS services, 20% was based on culture, collaboration and communication. Adrian Cockcroft gave a great talk on Chaos Engineering. His talk focused around three areas:

• Speed
• Scale
• Strategic
•  

For speed, he looked at how can you optimise things to improve your ‘time to value’. On scale, the focus was about moving away from ‘traditional’ ways of working to ‘rapid development’. And for strategic, he talked about moving from disaster recovery to chaos engineering to now building and running resilient critical systems.

His slides with a lot more detail were largely based upon an earlier deck for a talk he gave at Trajectory Conf. I strongly recommend having a look.

OTHER TALKS

There were other interesting talks around

• AWS Datalake;
• Amazon Forecast;
• AWS Backup; and
• AWS Outposts
•  

I’d like to thank Matt Taylor, Gerado Estaba and all of the AWS Partner Solutions around the world team for hosting such a great event.

Hit me up on Twitter @mysqldbahelp / @cevoaustralia or via our contact page if you want to know more about the AWS APN Ambassador program or any of the services mentioned here.