AWS Summit

This year’s AWS Summit Online experience takes place on 18-19 May 2021 and will bring together the cloud community from around Australia and New Zealand to hear keynotes from industry leaders, dive deep into educational sessions, engage in hands-on labs, and chat one to one with AWS experts. 

We spoke to our Technical Team Leader, Cameron Roberts, to learn more about the AWS Summit and what he’s excited about learning. Cam holds a number of AWS certifications and is an AWS Solutions Architect Professional and AWS DevOps Engineer Professional.

Tell us a bit about the AWS Australia and New Zealand Summit

Whilst AWS re:Invent is three weeks of cutting edge innovation, the ANZ Summit is more of a learning event and gives us the opportunity to hear from AWS leaders across Australia and New Zealand. This year it is a virtual event designed to educate people about AWS products and services. The idea is to help users accelerate their skills to build, deploy, and operate infrastructure and applications.

What’s on the agenda?

The great thing about the AWS Summit is that there are eight separate tracks designed specifically for developers, architects, data analysts, data scientists, information security, IT administrators, AWS enthusiasts and startup founders. 

What are your top picks to watch?

Personally, I’m looking forward to having our team watch some of the operational excellence sessions which should give them some new ideas on how we can move our customers towards cloud-native workloads whilst implementing supporting processes. 

Cost optimisation is always at the top of the list for customers, and I’ll be excited to see if the cost optimisation session (Day 1, IT Administrator track) provides any unique perspectives 

Will there be any useful practical examples?

AWS Network firewall was launched in late 2020, and I’m looking forward to seeing some examples of implementation.  I’m hoping for a demo of what’s capable so we can look to roll this out for our customers, as we are seeing more demand for intrusion prevention/detection functionality and policy based filtering of outbound traffic, which provides improved functionality over standard network security group rules.

I’m also hoping for demos of some of the AWS Technology Partner solutions, specifically around how AWS Network Firewall can be extended.

Any recommendations to learn about security?

Information Security is always top of mind for customers. The IAM and practical security incident response session will show some examples of recently released IAM features, as well as a real world case study for incident response (Day 2, InfoSec track). I’ll be tuning in!

Whatever you’re into, the AWS Summit will be a great opportunity to learn about new approaches and see best practise in action. Make sure you register online: https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/online/anz/