My Monday at AWS re:invent 2019

I started the day with breakfast at Denny’s. It was nice to have typical (I think) American breakfast. Thanks Mr. Heikki Hämäläinen for your company. By the way, all attendees from Solita are wearing those bright red hoodie shown in the picture. Thanks to our Cloud Ambassador Anton Floor. The hoodie makes it a lot easier to spot a colleague in a crowded places. Okay, let’s start going through my actual sessions.

How NextRoll leverages AWS Batch for daily business operations – CMP311

Advertisement company’s Tech Lead Mr. Roozbeh Zabihollahi described shortly their journey with AWS Batch service. If I remember correctly, they use about 5000 CPU years which is huge amount of computing power. It was nice to hear NextRoll allows their teams quite freely to choose which services they want to use. Nowadays Mr. Zabihollahi sees that more and more teams are looking into AWS Batch as a promising choice to use, rather than Hadoop or Spark.

Mr Zabihollahi believes that AWS Batch is good for several things:

AWS Batch is good for

If you are consideration start using AWS Batch you should be familiar at least these challenges:

The Mr. Steve Kendrex (Sr. Technical Product Manager, AWS) presented the road map of AWS Batch service. The support for Fargate (a.k.a serverless container service) is coming but Steve could not provide details for a wide audience. My personal guess is the spot instance support for Fargate is coming soon which provide key cost efficiency factor for batch operations.

Build self-service registration with facial recognition – ARC320

My first builder session this year was about integrating facial recognition for registering guests to an event. Me and four other attendees were led by Mr. Alan Newcomer (Solutions Architect, AWS) to this interesting topic. Mr. Newcomer had lived before near Las Vegas which was interesting to hear about him.

Each builder session starts with short queuing for the right table which you have hopefully reserved a spot beforehand:

The hall has multiple tables which each has 7 chairs, one for a teacher and 6 for participants, and screen for guidance purposes.

Typical the teacher provides website which has all the required information to do exercise. Additional to that the teacher provides unique password for each participant eg. for AWS Console login. After that each participant can start doing the exercise by themselves. The teacher provides helps whenever needed. You need to keep good pace all the time to be able to do whole exercise.

During the recognition session we built an application with had tree main functionalities:  user registering, do RSVP one day before the event and finally registering user at event via facial recognition. You actually look up the workshop material by yourself here: http://regappworkshop.com/

Managing DNS across hundreds of VPCs – NET411

This was my second chalk talk today. It started very well because right at the beginning audience heard real life problems from different attendees. The chalk talk was guided by Mr. Matt Johnson (Manager, Solutions Architecture, WWPS, AWS) and Mr. Gavin McCullagh (Principal System Development Engineer, AWS). They did extremely well.

It was reminded that the support for overlapping private zones was published recently. It enables autonomous structured dns management in multi-account environment.  For more information go to: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-route-53-now-supports-overlapping-namespaces-for-private-hosted-zones/

During the session we looked up four different architecture for sharing DNS information with multiple VPCs (~accounts). The number four “Share and Associate Zones and Rules” was the most interesting which suites for massive number of private DNS zones and VPCs. It has hub account for outbound DNS traffic to corporate network and it uses private zone associating between VPC’s. The associating does not yet have native CloudFormation support but there are several ways to handle association, eg. using CloudFormation custom resources or custom Lamda function.

One major feature request was that AWS should support DNS query logging (query and response) in the VPC. The audience wanted to receive the logging information to CloudWatch log groups. The logging is needed for security/audit and debugging purposes.

Processing AWS Ground Station data in AWS – NET409

This my second builder session sounded very fancy, handling data from satellites. The attendees had very different experience from AWS and from satellites, everything from one to five in both topics. After the session I needed to update my CV…

In the sky there are few open satellites. Those can be listened by AWS Ground Station service and the data received to AWS account. The data link between the Ground Station and your VPC is made via elastic network interface (ENI).

In the example case we received 15 Mbps stream for 15 minutes. It was the period that the satellite was visible for the Ground Station’s antenna system. The stream from Ground Station needs always to be received by to Kratos DataDefender software that will parse UDP traffic. The Ground Station traffic is not in right order and sometimes missing species which is handled by the DataDefender.

The data stream was analyzed in few phases via S3 bucket and EC2 instances. The final product was precise TIFF format picture of the view of the satellite passing the Ground station antenna. The resolution was about 1 megapixel per kilometer.

Nordics Customer Reception

The evening ended to pleasant and well organised the Nordics Customer Reception event at the Barrymore. The Solita was one of the sponsors of the event. From the terrace we had great view towards the Encore hotel:

Would you like to hear more what happens in re:Invent 2019? Sign up to our team’s Whatsapp group to chat with them and register to What happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas webinar to hear a whole sum-up after the event.

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