AWS Summit ASEAN 2023 🌎
Written by @admin1 on Thu May 04 2023 09:04:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)Today, I attended my first in-person tech conference in Singapore @ Marina Bay Sands Expo Level 5.
It was refreshing to see so many technologists together learning about the latest trends in cloud computing from AWS.
The keynote opening address was pretty enlightening. Learning about how AWS decided to create a new network protocol (AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram Protocol) because of its better performance and higher throughput compared to the conventional TCP network protocol, hearing about Grab developed their own in-house solution - i.e. GrabMaps which also utilizes AWS, and seeing the amazing potential of Cloud Computing in general, made me understand why many corporations have migrated (or at least are in the midst of migration) from on-prem data centers to the cloud.
I've also had the privilege to network & speak to an AWS staff to learn more about ServerlessPresso (the open source app that is used by the coffee booths to serve us delicious coffee & latte at the AWS Summit).
Essentially its an app that has a minimalistic UI design, and is powered by serverless AWS Lamda and AWS Step functions. The AWS staff shared the actual architectural diagram of the entire full stack app, and it was very interesting to see how the different components of the system, both the frontend and backend, interacted with each other using various AWS cloud computing resources and technologies.
For those interested in that particular app, you can go to this link for more information: AWS ServerlessPresso.
As I walked around to explore the various booths, I observed that there were many SaaS and PaaS companies at the Summit. They were essentially educating the crowd of technologists about the various solutions that their companies are trying to provide. Many of these companies are data-driven, and utilizes data to deliver new business insights and solutions for the world.
There were also many free swag and free food at the Summit. I had a pretty delicious bowl of ravioli, and drank a nice warm cup of latte as well.
The good thing about this Summit was that it provided participants with a multitude of AWS related workshops to upskill your cloud computing knowledge/skills. The workshop that really interested me was the AWS DeepRacer workshop hence I went for that one.
The AWS DeepRacer workshop provided a high level overview of Reinforcement Learning, and taught us the very basics of deploying your first Machine Learning model on AWS. In order to fine tune your ML model (in the form of an AWS virtual car agent), we would essentially have to explore the documentation, and read up more on how to optimize your reward function, optimize your action space, finetune your hyper-parameters, and many more. Participants of the workshop also got a $30 AWS voucher as well ;)
Overall I had a pretty good time at this AWS Summit 😃! Seeing the sea of technologists which came from various companies - ranging from FAANG companies, to financial institutions and MNCs, to SME/startups, amalgated together to learn the latest cloud computing trends was pretty heartwarming 😊.
Hope to be able to attend my next tech conference very soon!
