Top Takeaways from Optimize Your AWS FEST

Every quarter, we bring you Optimize Your AWS Fest, a FREE, virtual global summit for cloud customers managing their workloads on AWS.

We like to call it ‘edutainment’, as we stress ‘fun’ and ‘celebratory’ as well as providing practical and actionable takeaways for anyone and everyone in the AWS community —whether you’re a dabbler who is just testing out small environments with a few virtual machines or a professional who is self-managing petabyte-scale data on multiple clouds.

The problem of managing resources is so common, yet it’s still being addressed in the industry because employees simply don’t have the time as their environments scale. Companies are becoming multi-cloud and resource management becomes extremely complex. As we add cloud technologies,“How do we effectively manage our resources?” becomes the main question to answer.

Luckily, we have experts on hand to share their knowledge and mind-blowing insights on things like cloud security, cost savings, storage, monitoring, archiving, deployment, multi and hybrid cloud, sustainability, migration, performance and much more.

This AWS FEST brought us five amazing speakers with decades of knowledge and sound advice, and was moderated by our host with the most – Jon Myer. We were also honored to have Jeff Barr come in and provide his intro and recap of the event (be sure to see his clip below).

But because we know you are short on time…

These are our top takeaways from AWS FEST September 2022

Building an Optimization Data Lake with Steph Gooch

Steph is an expert on long-term spend and has helped AWS customers save hundreds of thousands of dollars as Sr. Commercial Architect on the AWS Optics Team. She had so many valuable takeaways, it was hard to choose our top ones. Steph recommends:

• When you can always go granular. Set up the most granular cost data lake there is – AWS Cost and Usage Reports to fully understand what is causing your spend.

• Have ownership strategy. Collect account metadata from your account structure. It’s much easier to optimize resources when you know who owns them and when you have data attached to them.

• Use tools like Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to not only access and query your Data Lake in S3, but to automate, email, and visualize these queries – a really useful tip when providing select data to departments and management.

Moving to Multi-Cloud Successfully (the first time) with David Linthicum

David serves as Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte and is a cloud computing pioneer. He’s written countless books including the bestselling ‘Enterprise Application Integration’ and gave a pretty mind-blowing session on how to manage the chaos of multi-cloud. Our top takeaways:

• Most multi-cloud enterprise architecture is actually unplanned. This is usually due to different departments bringing in their own architecture which causes cloud management complexity and chaos.

• Supercloud is becoming a thing. Cross Cloud Services (also known as Metacloud) allow you to build tools that sit above existing cloud providers in order to effectively manage them (i.e. security and backup/recovery operations – N2WS being a prime example of this).

• Adding more technology and scaling will hit a tipping point — managing the complexity of each cloud is simply too much to handle. Adopt the latest technologies that span clouds to orchestrate operations, security, governance, backup, etc to avoid management nightmare and save on skillset costs.

The Best Cloud Native Approach with Bernard Golden

Bernard was named one of the 10 most influential people in cloud computing by Wired Magazine. He is Exec. Technical Advisor at VMWare helping the largest customers seamlessly migrate to cloud-native applications. Here are some of his many amazing tips:

• Remove developer toil using automation. Make it as easy as possible for developers to do their work. Automate resource access, predefined resource types and templates to reduce setup time and benefit from a security and compliance perspective.

• Don’t keep all source code in a single monolithic repository. It makes it difficult to be resilient and isn’t cost effective as you end up deploying more servers than you need. Microservices lets you run smaller instances, gets you better tuning and is much more cost effective.

• Design for change. Many make the mistake of designing for a non-adaptable environment. Architect so you can have groups work on their parts (This goes back to microservices).

Build Your Brand as a Cloud Influencer with Evan Kirstel

Evan brought a truly unique perspective to AWS FEST as one of the most influential B2B marketeers in the US. With deep knowledge of social, mobile, IoT and voice/video/web collaboration, he’s helped clients grow from zero to tens of thousands of engaged followers. We were truly inspired to show ourselves off after his session. His insights and recommendations:

• Particularly through the pandemic, the distinction between personal and professional, work and home life has been blurred. It’s never been more important to stand out and promote your capabilities and projects.

• It’s not what you know, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. You can be the most amazingly skilled architect or designer, but if the community doesn’t know what you’re working on, you will go unnoticed.

• Community is Key. Participate and interact with like minded people within Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, AWS Advocate roles and other creator communities to help you lead from the front. Organic social media content will have a tremendous impact on improving your learning curve as well as greatly affecting your personal and professional life.

Cloud State of Play with Richard Simon

Known as ‘The Cloud Therapist’ on his YouTube channel, Richard is a Cloud Native/OpenSource advocate who loves to pick apart industry trends in his vlog Cloud State of Play. He currently serves as CTO at T-Systems where he supports clients in optimizing all aspects of their cloud journey. Richard session was as fun and stimulating as always – here’s are his top AWS trends to look out for in 2023:

• GitOps is growing. GitOps, an operational framework to automate the way we deploy infrastructure (much like how with Devops we’ve automated code) focuses on the pull process – once you’ve built an image, GitOps checks how that affects the existing infrastructure.

• Cloud Network Management – a new term coined by Richard, himself! The idea being that way we are doing networking, as environments become more complex cannot be sustained (manually, using Terraform scripts, etc). We need to utilize tools to manage increasingly complex networks – ideally that can span clouds (which brings us back to our Supercloud and Metacloud recurring multi-cloud theme).

• Currently there aren’t many solutions at the vendor level that provide a singular common network plane with common access control and API driven. There are AWS tools that can help such as AWS Network Manager, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Network ACLs and AWS Flow Logs.

AWS FEST Recap with Jeff Barr

Jeff of course needs no intro as perhaps the most trusted voice for all things AWS. We were very excited to have Jeff provide opening remarks as well as his recap here.

There you have it. Our top takeaways from AWS FEST – once again, a huge success getting the AWS community together to share valuable, timely knowledge and have lots of fun while we’re at it.

But the magic isn’t stopping here. Be sure to join us at the next AWS FEST on December 14th, where we’ll be doing an AWS re:Invent recap!

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