The AWS cloud services are on the rise. The global AWS community is also growing. This is a fact and it was proven last Saturday (11.May.2019) in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was the second AWS Community Day. Over 500 people gathered to learn more about AWS and share ideas and experience. There are many such events around the world. This one, however, was unique for me because it was my first AWS conference in my country 🙂
I go to many conferences around the world (and sometimes I present) because of my awesome job at SiteGround (we’re hiring). Sadly, I’ve been to just several conferences in Bulgaria. I am usually tired of all the travelling, and when I am in Bulgaria I usually spent time with my family. I almost skipped this conference as well. I got back from Colombia on Friday. I was really surprised when my phone reminded me that I have a ticket for the event on the other day. This time, however, jet lag spared me and I woke up on time. A colleague of mine also gave a talk. Thus I decided to attend and support him. I am glad I did not miss the event! Here is why 🙂
Bulgaria Has a Vibrant AWS Community
I’ve always known that there are many successful AWS related companies in Bulgaria. I’ve never really interacted with the community. I guess I never believed the community was so “alive and kicking”. I was happy to see so many people at the conference. I then understood that the conference this year was twice as big compared to last year. Here are some stats:
- 500+ attendees in 2019. Compared to 300 in 2018.
- 14 session in 2019. Compared to just 4 in 2018.
- 3 workshops in 2019. Compared to 0 in 2018.
- 2 tracks is 2019 and just 1 in 2018.
Kudos to the organisers and to the growing AWS community is Sofia!
TOP-NOTCH SPEAKERS and sessions
The conference was full of good speakers. There were also two evangelists from AWS. The organiser of the Sofia AWS meetup presented as well. I can’t wait for the organisers to publish the slides and the videos because I missed some great talks judging by all the tweets and the hallway discussions.
My top 3 presentations are:
Ivaylo Bratoev – “The Pragmatic Way to Run Your Code in AWS”
Ivaylo is the organiser of the Sofia AWS meetup. He is a co-founder of st6.io. He works with AWS on a daily basis and has years of experience building and maintaining cloud solutions.
At first I thought that this will be just another session about EC2, AWS Lambda, the AWS Elastic Container Service and/or Kubernetes. I was wrong! The main message of his presentation was to “Mind the Hype” when you build solutions and want to use all the newest technologies. This is something extremely important and I think senior engineers must teach junior guys about risks which exist in such situations. People need to start asking the right questions when it comes to using the newest and greatest technologies. Is this technology right my case? Can our team manage the level of complexity which will be added to the solution? How much time will our engineers need to learn how to use this new technology? What about the community – is it active enough? What did other companies learn using this new technology?
I really hope more people liked this session. I will update this section of the blog post once I have a link to the presentation 🙂
Aleksandar Simovic – “Testing Serverless Applications“
Talking about new technologies and hype there is no way to skip a talk about serverless. Many people still avoid serverless because they think it is really difficult to test serverless applications. I’ve personally heard this many times during conferences. Aleksandar really did a great job showing that this is not the case anymore. With some code examples this is a great start for devs. The presentation is also good for business guys and decision makers that are still wondering if serverless is the right way to go. Check the slides at:
ALEX Casalboni – “Choosing the Right Database for the Right Applications in 2019“
Alex talked about all the different AWS database services that are present nowadays. The fact is that the AWS DB services jungle is huge. Many people are lost when they first have to decide which database service to use. The short answer is that you need to use all database services. The long answer is “It depends” 😀
You can check the slides here:
If you need to see some examples check this demo app which uses several AWS DB services:
https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-bookstore-demo-app
Conclusion
The AWS Sofia Community Day conference surprised me and I am happy I decided to go. It definitely was successful. I found out that the Bulgarian AWS community is bigger and stronger than I suspected. Thanks to all the sponsors, speakers and attendees. See you next year!