AWS Cloud Day Dublin Recap

As a Solutions Architect for an advanced Global AWS account partner, transACT Technology Solutions for UK & Ireland, I was delighted to attend the Dublin event with AWS who have kicked off their first in-person cloud event since Covid with their Cloud Day Dublin.

This event was focused on the Irish region, exploring architectures of various industry leading clients, key business opportunities and talks from some of the top talent AWS have in their Ireland team.

This blog will go over a recap of the day incase you weren’t able to make it, and hopefully give you the information needed to know if you want to attend next year! The picture above tells a good story on the interest generated for the day.

The event started out with a keynote from AWS VP & Chief Evangelist Jeff Bar. This keynote was a well rounded talk around the presence of AWS in Ireland, including the jobs they provide, economic contributions and some of their top customers in the country.

The talk then moved to the Irish region itself, it’s history, it’s future expansions and the sustainability efforts within the region. One of the most interesting points of this topic is how they are currently trialing the use of renewable, hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to power their datacenters (Starting with Ireland and Sweden).

There were around 25 different talks, panels and roundtables throughout the day. These were split into three tracks: Tech, Business & Customer. Because the talks were spread throughout three categories it gave lots of good options and content for everyone to consume, irrespective of them being technical, business managers, or even interested customers wanting to see how some of the Irish regions industry leading clients are running their systems.

Here are some of the talks that took place at the event, some of which will be covered in more detail below.

One of the most interesting talks in the Tech Track that I attended was ‘Scaling up to your first 10 million users’ hosted by Fabrizio Fortunato (Head of Frontend, Ryanair) & Damian Niezgoda (Sr Solutions Architect, AWS). This talk was based around making the best use of the AWS services available to increase high availability and scalability within your application. Fabrizio then went into detail on the frontend architecture that Ryanair uses to minimize latency and maximise scalability with user requests, including the use of CloudFront and Lambda@Edge functions to move the compute power closer to it’s end users.

This was a common theme amongst all tracks at the event, it was not only AWS employees speaking, but also customers, providing real life examples of how these services are used within their business, and giving a very interesting insight on how to best utilize the AWS Cloud; which I found to be a great way of keeping the talks interesting and exciting.

Along with the talks there was also a main lobby area with multiple stalls placed around focusing on some key areas of benefit to customers, these included an Ask the expert stall where attendees can speak with AWS Architects on problems or ideas they have and how to best implement them and an AWS Projects and Resources one that guided people to key resources they can reference when building on the cloud. These were the two main stalls that grabbed peoples attention.

One talk on the business track that I attended was ‘Building a Successful Cloud Center of Excellence’. This talk was presented by Daniel Dalla (Head of Cloud, Bank of Ireland) and Richard Caven (Lead EMEA Banking Specialist, AWS). This was centered on building a CCoE within your business and the benefits it brings.

It started off talking about what a CCoE actually is, the core pillars of a CCoE (Governance, Brokerage, Community, Design Authority), how to implement one within your organization and then finished off with an example of the CCoE structure the Bank of Ireland have in place, real life examples of how this has helped them and then opening the room for a Q&A for the audience.

The event was packed with talks like the Cloud Centre of Excellence one I just mentioned, giving good ideas for improving your business and processes, aswell as sparking ideas or ways of using AWS services within your business to improve your systems and applications.

Overall the event had a broad set of talks that catered to everyone’s needs and interests and was followed by a drinks and networking reception at the end of the day to meet and interact with fellow attendees and speakers of the day. A good end to a good event, it’s certainly been very beneficial from a transACT partner company perspective, and clients we have spoke to also found the day to be very interesting and informative too.