Amazon Web Services pop-up loft (Ask an Architect area, lecture hall, kitchen/lounge)
Photo credit: Amazon.com.
I happened to be in SF today, so I went to the Amazon Web Services pop-up loft on Market St.
Amazon rented an empty storefront for 4 weeks for lecture sessions upstairs, and a computer lab and an ‘Ask an Architect’ bar downstairs.
One of the hosts said the loft was a shell in May, and they had to build out everything: the kitchen area, 2 bathrooms and various partitions.
I asked the experts about new EBS and RDS features, and they had answers as well as a $100 AWS credit.
The weather was sunny and warm in SF.
Lots of street performers and hustlers, including a very smooth male R&B singer. A young rapper named Rap2K15 was selling hand-made CDs.
Update 2014 06 23: Apparently a drawing was held, and I was one of 3 winners of a free general pass to the AWS:Reinvent Conference 🙂
Update 2014 06 24:
AWS Bootcamp
Full-day AWS overview, including EC2, S3, RDS, VPC and IAM, with 2 labs.
“Provisioning and Managing AWS Infrastructure with Chef” with special guest George Miranda, Chef Technical Consultant, Chef
George talked about using Chef tools like chef metal, knife and chef zero and a minimal amount of ruby to make an AMI and provision a MySQL server and 5 Nginx web servers.
Update 2014 06 26:
Dealing With Obstacles at Scale, Bob Hagemann, Twilio
To reduce pain:
– UTC timezone
– UTF8
– use thin AMI and chef/puppet instead of thick AMI
– wrote boxconfig a few years ago (like netflix asgard)
– remote admin mainly
– small teams 3-8
– services should run in 3 AZs
– monitoring with nagios, cron, pingdom
– haproxy on each host as proxy
– MySQL, MHA, LVM. Manual failover.
– SQS DLQ
– global low latency with route53
– http://github.com/twilio
– @bobzilla42
– Uses freeswitch plus own telcom sw
– billing system 100s QPS
– Ops team is about 8 people
– VPNs to HQ and carrier-approved colo
– three founders, one came from Amazon.
925 Market Street, SF
June 4 – 27, 2014 (likely closed on the 27th for dismantling)
Free registration, tshirts and lunch. Closes 5:30 pm, 6:00 pm or 8:00 pm daily.
Muni 30 and 45 return from Market St. and 5th to Caltrain.
@AWSstartups #AWSloft
