Exploring the DevOps and Cloud Landscape: Insights from October 2023 Events in UK

I have joined 3 events this month and they are London DevOps and AWS User Group Meetup. It was interesting to meet with people who work in this area. I can’t believe that their duties are just about the deployment and cloud side because I’ve already been doing all of this stuff even if we have lots of different responsibilities.

From AWS User Group UK Meetup, some of the guys have built a browser based game by using cloud functions. It was great because without having any servers, just connecting to the right service on AWS, it works! Anyway, it is expensive because you prefer a fast way to do that. This is a crucial point while building anything because if you choose a fast way to do something, you have to be flexible in different criteria to keep it going. Software is a world of trade-offs. Another talk from the event was about the architectural evolution of Amazon Internal Data Platform. Their problem has started receiving lots of requests from customers or data science teams to access any data on Amazon. They have built a platform to serve datasets from databases and open their data to internal teams so they don’t need to spend time to give any kind of datasets to anyone. He talked about the experience that they got while building the platform. Again they have used different amazon services called registry service, lambda, event publisher, event bridge and dynamo db.

Another event is London DevOps 18 and I have already joined their 16 and 17 events and looks like I am being their persistent member of the community in time. Soon I will apply to be a speaker in some of their events. Looking forward to doing that! In the event, there are two talks but I will mention one of them in the article. It is about delete staging and totally related to technical points of development. Staging is basically keeping code in a local computer and then deploying code to development and production servers. And their problem was having lots of stages even if they have a small team and not a big product. There is a trade-off again and they have solved by phasing-out stages; however, another problem occurred because they have to test their software and product before giving users. They have implemented TDD, continuous delivery and fast feedback loops to their development process so they write tests and their tests have been checked in the local environment automatically and then they keep their code on different branches. And after sending code to a remote repository, they check each other’s code lines and decide whether there is change needed or not. It looks okay but unfortunately needs lots of dedication and attention in the process and actually the reason for having stages is this! This is over-thinking but might work in some projects or teams.