The event scene is at a standstill - at least when it comes to physical presence, the current pandemic is forcing us to rethink. Together with AWS and viesure, creative-it decided to take networking to a new level.
The 19th AWS Meetup in Vienna, therefore, took place via Zoom. This was a new and exciting experience for us as well as the community. Above all, we are very proud to have been represented by the concentrated female power of creative-it in the Meetup.
Linda Mohamed, Senior Consultant, and creative-it member were one of the speakers of the Meetup, while our Digital Marketing Specialist, Alica Weber, moderated the event. As a cherry on top, a goodie box was delivered directly to the doorstep of the registered participants. Since the pleasure may not be missing of course also Lieferando vouchers were made available to the first 25 participants.
For those who want a short recap, we have prepared an AWS Meetup Recap in this blog post. Everything you need to know can be found here ;-)
Don't hesitate to watch the entire Meetup as a stream on YouTube:
Let's sum up
The meetup was kicked off by Bernhard Keprt, with the intro to the proceedings for all participants. Afterward, the floor was handed over to the two speakers.
The structure of the meetup was designed to be interactive, so there was an hour of talk followed by breakout rooms to answer any questions.
The first talk in the round was started by Markus Füsi, who made it his mission to take a closer look at "CloudFormation vs. Ansible vs. Terraform". In his talk, Markus highlights some options for Infrastructure as Code and discusses the use of AWS CloudFormation, Ansible and Terraform. He explains the difference between procedural and declarative languages by showing code examples of the same IaC setup in the different options. He also goes into more detail about scaling issues and explicitly shows the advantages and disadvantages.
In the following talk, Linda Mohamed talked about using AWS Rekognition for a sustainable fashion use case she is currently working on.
What it was about?
As sustainability becomes more and more prominent, second-hand products are also becoming more urgent. But unlike the mass clothing industry, where a product is sold 1,000,000,000 times, we have the exact opposite process with second-hand fashion - because every item sold is unique and is checked manually.
To achieve growth as a second-hand online store, we wanted to optimize the product input process so that the client quickly sees the improvement. At the moment, they are reaching their limits by adding 100 products per week. To scale this, they would need to hire additional staff. The idea was to automate the entry of products into the online store by analyzing the images with AWS Rekognition to collect the information needed for product entry into the online store in a simple CSV. Aside from the fact that Rekognition thinks jeans always have to equal pants, the use case works relatively well and the next steps are already planned.
In the interest of all attendees, Dennis Traub and Kris Howard were recruited for the Meetup, giving us the opportunity to open an AWS Breakout Room for all attendees (which of course enjoyed a great turnout). Dennis and Kris gave us the opportunity to clarify a huge amount of questions regarding AWS-related topics. As you can imagine, their breakout room was exploding with attendees and interesting discussions.
Fun Fact:
However, there is one thing we don't want to keep from you. We all know how much effort goes into organizing such an event, how much brainpower goes into it. Nevertheless, you often can't be prepared for everything, and that's how it happened to us this time. We got ZOOMBOMBED. Of course, the troll attack was unexpected for all participants at the first moment, especially for our speakers. Nevertheless, they didn't let themselves be put off (applause for that) and after a short moment of shock, our bouncer had the situation under control again.
As you know, you never stop learning - that's why we were able to take learning for the next Meetup - we just say "the strictest door in Vienna?
If you are hungry for more events like this, no worries the next AWS meetup is already planned.