Review of the AWS Summit Paris 2024

Review of the Paris 2024 Summit

On April 3rd, the Paris 2024 Summit, described as the largest event dedicated to Cloud, Data, and AI, was held. AWS brought together over 9000 partners and customers at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. It was my first time attending the AWS Summit event. It was an engaging experience with a diverse range of content between a Keynote where AWS announced some news within its services and a large variety of sessions.

Keynote

The day began with a keynote centered around the prevailing subject of AI. Key takeaways from the keynote included:

• AWS unveiled the availability of Bedrock in the Paris region. This service, launched in April 2023, empowers developers to craft applications leveraging generative AI through pre-trained models offered by startups.
• The Bedrock service has been augmented with the introduction of the latest Mistral model, named Large.

Sessions

At this Summit, over 150 sessions took place, offering a diverse range of topics and discussions. While numerous sessions focused on AI, notably generative AI, which is a current focal point, I made a deliberate choice to explore other sessions that addressed a variety of subjects equally compelling. Among the standout sessions were:

• Boost Your Agility: Ultra-Fast Deployment with Continuous Configuration
• Accelerate your scaling with robust cloud foundations

Session: Boost Your Agility: Ultra-Fast Deployment with Continuous Configuration

In the early days adjusting the codebase proved to be both complex and slow. In practice, when Ops identifies an issue within the application, they must await developer availability to implement the necessary modifications and re-deploy. This slow software deployment process acted as a bottleneck, impeding the pace at which software features and application enhancements could be implemented. At this point, configuration was still directly handled within the codebase of an application. In this session, AWS introduced the concept of continuous configuration. According to Werner Vegels, CTO of Amazon: >“The process by which configuration is managed separately from application code and continuously queried at runtime, which we call continuous configuration (CC), has had a fundamental impact on our ability to maintain high levels of availability while being able to adapt and react in real time. ”

Within AWS, continuous configuration can be achieved through the utilization of AWS AppConfig, a feature within AWS Systems Manager.

Throughout a configuration deployment, AppConfig monitors the application to ensure that the deployment is successful. In case of a problem, it is possible to roll back the change.

The dangers of continuous configuration

• A typo = an incident
• If the configuration is deployed too quickly, the impact of the change can be explosive.

To mitigate these risks, AWS AppConfig validators are employed to validate configurations. They conduct either a syntactic check using a JSON schema or a semantic check using an AWS Lambda function. In this case, configuration deployments proceed only if the configuration data is conform.

Session: Accelerate your scaling with robust cloud foundations

During this session, AWS introduced several best practices for constructing a foundational AWS Cloud environment that aligns with the company's IT practices.

The challenge lies in successfully combining self-service capabilities, swift experimentation, agile response to changes, and fault tolerance, while also ensuring robust security, compliance, and cost management.

An initial recommendation from AWS is to adopt a multi-account strategy.

Benefits of implementing a multi-account strategy

• Promoting innovation and agility: A multi-account approach allows for dedicated accounts designed for testing and experimentation:

  • Sandbox accounts: Isolated from the company’s data and services, these accounts have fewer controls, granting greater access to AWS services for experimentation.
  • Deployment accounts: Offering restricted access to the company’s data and services, these accounts facilitate early-stage testing efforts.

• Security controls by environment: You have the flexibility to implement distinct security and operational policies customized to the various environments of a workload.__ __

• Protect sensitive data: Securing sensitive data becomes more manageable when stored within an AWS account specifically designed to handle it.

• Limit impacts by distributing quotas and API limits: Distribute quotas and limits established within an AWS account across multiple AWS accounts. It's important to note that AWS service quotas refer to the maximum limit of service resources or operations allowed within an account. For instance, within the AWS s3 service, the maximum number of buckets is currently set at 100.

• Effectively manage costs: Using different accounts for different business units and groups of workloads can help easily monitor, control and forecast cloud expenditures

AWS also recommended some key services for accelerating and automating the deployment of AWS landing zones:

• AWS Control Tower: Designed to simplify the process of setting up and governing a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices.
• AWS Config: Enables continuous monitoring and assessment of AWS resource configurations. It tracks changes to configurations and evaluates them against desired configurations to ensure compliance with policies and best practices.
• System Manager: Simplifies the operational tasks of managing AWS resources and applications at scale. It offers capabilities such as parameter storage, remote command execution, automation, and inventory management, helping users automate tasks, maintain compliance, and gain insights into their AWS infrastructure.

Following the introduction of the recommended best practices by AWS, VEOLIA showcased their implementation of a multi-account strategy. They shared some significant figures:

• Over 150 AWS accounts were created within a span of 12 months to enhance isolation.
• VEOLIA can create an AWS account in under 45 minutes through a fully automated process.

Conclusion

I highly recommend this conference, which is a true immersion into the AWS community in France. The sessions are diverse and can suit both expert audiences and curious beginners. However, I advise you to prepare your agenda in advance because the schedule is busy, with several sessions and workshops taking place simultaneously. Fortunately, you can organize your agenda using an application provided by AWS, which gives you an overview of the available sessions and their descriptions. agenda in advance because the schedule is busy, with several sessions and workshops taking place simultaneously. Fortunately, you can organize your agenda using an application provided by AWS, which gives you an overview of the available sessions and their descriptions.