Amazon recently held the first business and technical AWSome day event in Johannesburg. Since Cobi utilises an array of AWS services, we decided that it would be beneficial to attend. The event was a full day crammed with interesting talks from the high-level developers of the services themselves and featured two streams, catering to the technical and business orientated attendees. I chose the technical track and gained a better understanding of the products Amazon offer and how they interlink. There are a number of improvements we, at Cobi, can make to better utilise the platform.
A few things that stood out are the granularity possible with the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances, we are doing it wrong by having a non-scalable instance that is capable of meeting the maximum demand. We should instead be using small instances that have scalability in place to handle higher demand. This could decrease our net cost considerably.
Other interesting services include the SNS (Simple Notification Service), which offers a centralised location to handle push messages for all mobile platforms. Other powerful products would be a combination of the RDS (Relational Database Service) and Lambda could prove a powerful combination for hosting mobile API functions, but requires some further research.
The most impressive aspect was how Amazon and their AWS platform have grown over the years, with incredibly high numbers. Its no wonder they’re the leading company in cloud computing with their millions of servers hosted on nearly every continent.
More information on the event, including copies of the slides can be obtained from the AWS Johannesburg website.
