therolle.com – The Pragmatist Futurist

AWS User Group Finland September Meetup – Sponsored by Digia

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On September 26th we had the second AWSFIN meetup which was sponsored by Digia.

We had around 50 people attending and came all the way to Pitäjänmäki, so thanks for all of the attendees to take the time to travel and coming to hear us talk.

The lineup for the evening was as follows:

I kicked off the evening with my regular “New and Noteworthy” session. You can find my slides from below for the announcements I decided were important since the last meetup.

Managing your multi account environments with Control Tower

Arto was talking about the Control Tower experience they had testing it out. Control Tower was announced in ReInvent 2018 and recently went to general availability.

It is currently somewhat limited, but eventually we will probably see it replacing technologies like AWS Landing Zone or AWS Deployment Framework, but that’s still long time coming. Currently, it is greenfield deployments only with no possibility to bring in existing account structures. So keep that in mind, when investigating the issue.

In the mean time, ALZ and ADF are the way to go, in addition naturally for bunch of 3rd party or in-house solutions. Just a word of advice: if you want to go to ALZ or ADF route, consider attaining the services of AWS ProServe or talented AWS Partner to install & configure that for you. It’s not an easy fix and out-of-the-box solution to use either of those. Which is I guess one of the reasons why Control Tower exists in the first place…

Yle and Data – the journey so far

Next up we were listening to the story told by Ana about how Yle (national broadcast company of Finland) has transitioned towards serverless infrastructure in AWS and how do they manage and utilize the data.

Especially one pain point they had in regards of reliability had been AWS Beanstalk, which was replaced by containers and Fargate.

As the Yle platform runs some of the most interesting programming in the country (like election night result broadcast, some of the winter sports which are really popular in Finland) so in terms of loads, these services are some of the most heavily used in Finland.

We saw some metrics from a night, where there was not just one hugely popular broadcast, but two overlapping and the AWS limit of 100 containers per account was not enough for the system and it barely got through the night.

We were also happy to hear, that Yle really makes an effort to make great services and keep on continuously evolving, even if they are publicly funded, which is not always ideal condition to nurture innovation 🙂

Next time in October

We are hoping to finalize the details for the next meetup shortly and it will be in the latter part of October. So stay tuned, join the Nordic community slack and our meetup to keep up with the news!