AWS Summit Chicago 2019 was another massive success. More than 6,000 attendees flocked through the doors of the West Building in McCormick Place to hear a keynote speech given by Amazon’s VP of Compute Services – Matt Garman – and to learn more about AWS in the dozens of sessions, workshops, and bootcamps.
Although the 7:00 a.m. start time was described as “unearthly” by visitors from the West Coast, the AWS Summit Chicago 2019 was certainly out of this world. The event – promoted by organizers as “bringing technologists together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS” – filled three floors of McCormick Place, as exhibitors and educators demonstrated how to get the best out of the AWS Cloud.
The most popular session of AWS Summit Chicago 2019 was undoubtedly the keynote speech given by Matt Garman – Amazon’s VP of Compute Services. In the speech, Matt focused on AWS’ container services (particular the App Mesh service) and serverless computing, and demonstrated how Coca-Cola and McDonald’s had both benefitted from the technologies using in-depth case studies.
Following Matt’s speech, a unique phenomenon occurred, as six parallel sessions were held simultaneously in the Skyline Ballroom. Attendees could listen to the session of their choice via color-coded headphones, which led to an eerily quiet – although colorful – ballroom. This is a great idea to solve the problem of popular sessions being full and not allowing everyone to attend who wants to.
A little later down in theater 1…
Although the headphones had their novelty moment, it didn’t keep the ballroom full. Many attendees headed down to Theater 1, where CloudHealth Senior Solutions Architect – Alex Shipley – was hosting a session entitled “Developing Your Cloud Center of Excellence using CloudHealth”. Cloud Centers of Excellence were recently described by Gartner as “the best way to ensure cloud governance while maintaining business agility”.
During the session, Alex explained that, as businesses move from an on-premises infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure, they change the way they use resources. Because of the significant operational change, it’s necessary to adopt cloud governance best practices. However, in order to ensure a successful transformation, every department needs to be singing from the same song sheet and following the same set of governance policies. This isn’t always straightforward.
The solution for getting every department on board is to create an organizational unit – a Cloud Center of Excellence – which includes representatives from each relevant department. The Cloud Center of Excellence acts as a hub that connects and directs each department, enabling the organizational unit to develop a holistic cloud strategy. With a holistic cloud strategy agreed by each department, the business is in a better position to accelerate its cloud journey towards cloud maturity.
Alex demonstrated how the concept of Cloud Centers of Excellence works in practice by discussing three case studies involving clients of CloudHealth Technologies – Zendesk, Trimble, and Veracode. He highlighted the challenges each client had faced, and how they had overcome the challenges using proven optimization and cloud governance best practices from CloudHealth across Reserved Instances management, identifying underutilized resources, and auto-governing rulesets.
The session was concluded by Alex explaining more about the CloudHealth platform in terms of policy management and hybrid cloud management before he disappeared off to the CloudHealth Technologies booth in order to help the swamped team demonstrate CloudHealth’s capabilities to hundreds of interested attendees and answer questions. For everybody who visited our booth at AWS Summit Chicago 2019, we hope you learned something valuable to take back to your businesses.
Your Chance to Hear Alex’s Session in New York
If you missed the AWS Summit Chicago 2019, you’ll have a chance to hear John McLoughlin discuss Cloud Centers of Excellence at the AWS Summit New York 2019. The Summit takes place at the Javits Center on Thursday 11th July; and, although entrance to the event is free, the number of attendees is limited to seven thousand, so early registration is recommended.
To book your seat for the AWS Summit New York 2019, or to find out more about the benefits of Cloud Centers of Excellence, contact us today. Our team of cloud experts will be happy to guide you through the registration process or – if you’re unable to attend the event – we’d be happy to discuss how CloudHealth can help your business accelerate its journey in the cloud.
