On October 24th, 2019 we had AWS User Group Finland October meetup sponsored by S-Group. Here are my short notes about the event, where we had around 50 quite senior attendees joining the meetup.
There was a bit of an overlap with some other events and I personally want to apologize for any inconvenience. There is definitely more coordination between big user groups and we have already started the talks with other meetup’s organizers about this.
What we at AWSFIN have also done, is that our schedule is out there already for the rest of the year, so people can try to navigate around those dates, if they seem it fit.
Sticker Madness!
The stickers were finally here for yours to be taking. I also had some vintage AWS stickers to spare and put the to good use.
I will bring some to the next meetup as well, if you missed this one and your laptop still has some real estate to spare.
Welcome words by S-Group
The event was opened by Kim Grönholm from S-Group digital development unit. Not everyone knows probably that S-Group is also a group working in and developing digital services, so it was nice to get some actual numbers and facts around that. S-Group is at the end of the day a company which has almost anyone living in Finland as a customer, one way or another. It would be really hard not to be, to be honest.
And special thanks also to Tommi Taskinen who helped great deal in the practicalities of this meetup from S-Group side.
New & Noteworthy
I talked my regular “new & noteworthy in AWS” session. Here is a shot by Ari Palo of me doing my rant. You can find the headlines of the most interesting launches in my slides.
My slides are here: https://www.slideshare.net/RolfKoski/aws-finland-meetup-2019-october
AWS Config Visualization Magic
Next up was my colleague Markus Toivakka from Cybercom talking about utilizing AWS Config logs as source for creating a live CMDB for your AWS environment. This is done by streaming the change data to Amazon Neptune graph database and as a proof of concept, it was visualized with a graph database tool Cytoscape.
As the Cloud is constantly changing and evolving environment, it makes a lot of sense to use dynamically created data and act as the source of truth for your CMDB queries.
Visualization is always naturally nice and makes it easier for humans to understand what’s going on in the demo, but the implications and possibilities for this kind of system are actually much more diverse, where you can present questions to the graph database in a multi-account environment for example to list all cross account role access patterns and such.
This presentation kind of stirred up the audience, when they realized what was the endgame here. And there were a lot of questions – which Markus naturally handled like a boss.
Sources for the demo are on Markus’ github here: https://github.com/markymarkus/graphcmdb
Data Lakes at S-Group
Janne Heikkilä was talking about the Data Lakes at S-Group and how their journey on those on top of AWS has went.
There were some interesting points about their almost two year journey and vision going ahead. Some concepts that for example AWS Lake Formation introduced, are still on the roadmap. One challenge is also that there are multiple businesses with multiple Data Lakes around S-Group and how to normalize some aspects across all of those. Interesting to see, I hope we hear some updates in the meetups about this in the future.
Next meetup
Next meetup will be on November 11th 2019 sponsored by Solita. The agenda for that event is super interesting, so I hope seeing you there!