AWS Summit

I attended the AWS Summit this week at McCormick Place.

So Amazon is much more beyond buying stuff on line... Its Amazon Web Service cloud thing is really worth looking into. Ok ok it has been around for a while but they have many new things now. There are so many things that they have to arrange free workshops with thousands of attendees giving out free coffee and donuts and sandwiches to attract you to listen to them talk how their stuff can help you.

It is now beyond hosting machines and databases... you can even write a stateless method to run without any servers now... Amazon also offer many more streaming stuff too.

I attended 1 day summit. Nothing to lose. Free food. Free toys given by people dying to talk to you about what their company can offer (mostly hey-i-know-how-to-secure-your-stuff-on-cloud). Nicely ran. A ton of people directly you where to go. Of course for an hour or so you can only get brief talks. It is unfortunate that there are multiple topics on same hour and you can only go to one. They keynote was nice... and had many thankful customers praising AWS. There was even a free lab that you can go play. I was able to follow its PDF to create a server and write a little php hello world. Yes, many stuff is a bit anti-intuitive. You have to use the fairly unpleasant looking Putty to include some private key file to remote login to the linux box... You can even talk to AWS experts directly... they stand around all day at a bar with chess and checker and foosball. Yes it is a bit of geeky land.

Do I get something out of that? A bit. Just get to hear some buzzwords is nice. But will need to dive deeper to appreciate what it can do. But it will cost you some $ to experiment... you get to pay what you use.. It is not like you get the java jdk and experiment all you want without paying a dime.