Introduction

This month I managed to drag myself out of the comfort of my home office and attended AWS Summit London 2023 with some other members of the PaaS team from Holland and Barrett

Planning the Journey

Why F1 choses AWS

Sadly the company expenses did not cover an F1 car so instead I took the train+subway into London. At the time I was living in Bournemouth and it was a 2-hour journey each way.. eww

Disclaimer btw, I hate traveling in and out of London…

The Cultural Experience

After navigating the noodle network(London subway) I shortly arrived at Excel Centre where the event was being held. The amount of people was insane. I found out the venue held around ~50k people at max capacity

Sessions

Multi-Cluster Design

Part 1: Multi-Cluster GitOps using Amazon EKS, Flux, and Crossplane

Part 2: Multi-Cluster GitOps — Cluster fleet provisioning and bootstrapping

A key highlight for me was a short 20-minute session we had with an AWS expert around multi-cluster best practices! This was super useful as it helped inform & validate our own investigations!

I hope to do a write-up on these findings ~mid 2024

Networking

Networking was a first for me and I was properly awkward to be completely honest! Thankfully my team did most of the engagement until I warmed up a little

It was pretty cool being able to meet and chat over different topics with our Organization’s Technical Account Managers from the likes of

AWS
GitLab
Datadog
Lacework

Throughout the day we acquired ALOT of free swag and fell victim to many email harvesting games/challenges

Thoughts

Overall, it was a long day and I was pretty tired. I kinda realized that after working from home for the past 6+ years, my social battery has become very short. Typical engineer right?

However, it was lovely to spend the day & post-event socials with my teammates, having spent so much time on calls with them it was nice to switch the context up