It was fun attending the AWS Summit at Santa Clara today. Albeit a free to register event, I felt it packed a lot of value.
The good things:
- I loved the “Best Practices for Using Apache Spark on AWS (Deep Dive)” talk by J Fritz. Not only did he demo things on 1.6, but also highlighted what could work better for Spark 2.0! I don’t see the video uploaded anywhere yet (will update if I get it), but you can check this post on slideshare, which is almost the same thing.
If you are interested, do checkout this blog for more on “Spark with AWS” stuff. - Meeting a lot of exhibits, talking to them, knowing various stuff the industry is pushing the tech envelope on, getting the goodies etc is always fun.
- Meeting fellow professionals and getting a chance to network are definite advantages for such meetups. I did meet my friend Javier who was also attending the Summit.
- A definite thumbs up for the venue and planning. I found good vegetarian lunch and an easy motorcycle parking spot. That’s already 5 * in my book.
The things that could have been better:
- One of the talk was plain and simple advertisement of AWS product. I get it that this is the AWS Summit and when you say “Best practices for Big Data on AWS”, you are going to show only AWS products. However, I feel you expect most people coming there to be aware of AWS products and this talk should have been more about the secret sauce one can use specifically on AWS. May be, inviting a company which is actually using AWS products for its Big Data applications would have been more fun.
- As with most other Summits, I feel there were definitely a couple of talks which I wanted to attend but could not. Providing access to recording of the content to registered users should be done. That’s a good practice by the Hadoop Summit organizers.
I will be browsing to see if I can find more about these talks which I couldn’t attend:- Creating Applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) on AWS
- Build a Serverless, Location-Aware, Search & Recommendations-Enabled Application
- Streaming Data Processing with Amazon Kinesis
- Getting Started with Amazon Machine Learning
If you haven’t already, definitely check the AWS Big Data blog. For reasons unknown to me, that blog doesn’t have an easy subscribe button.
Piyush Routray 