AWS User Group UK Meetup #45

Our final meetup of 2020 will again be online on our twitch channel https://www.twitch.tv/awsuguk Please remember to create a twitch account if you wish to ask questions to our speakers and panellists.

We are delighted to welcome Brian Carlson (@BrianCarlsonQED) as our first speaker. Brian is the Global Operations Excellence Lead for the AWS Well-Architected program and he will be sharing his insights on how to build a robust monitoring strategy.

For our second talk we have the amazing Blanca Garcia-Gil (@blanquish) who is a Principal Systems Engineer at the BBC. She will be speaking about how improving Redshift performance helps deliver faster business insights.

Talk 1:

Build a Robust Monitoring Strategy with Brian Carlson.

In this talk I break expectations by not focusing on “observability.” Monitoring is looking for something with the intent to act upon it. We will discuss the kinds of insight we can gain, and how they apply to business outcomes.

We start at the very beginning of developing strategy by asking the question, “who will consume the insights we gain, and what are they trying to do with them?” I’ll present a simple strategy for going from business outcomes, through KPIs, to metrics and thresholds. We will talk about time horizons until action is taken and reporting versus alerting. To wrap things up will evaluate severity on a scale of “delay eating lunch” through “get up at 3am.”

Brian is the global Operational Excellence lead for the AWS Well-Architected program. He is responsible for researching, developing, and sharing best practices in operations with customers and partners. Based outside of Washington D.C. he has a passion for enabling customer success by guiding them to improved operations. Prior to AWS Brian was the Technical Lead for a large public sector international network. In that role he was the final point of escalation and responsible for continual improvement.

Talk 2:

How Improving Redshift Performance Helps Deliver Faster Business Insights with Blanca Garcia-Gil.

At the BBC we use Amazon Redshift as to store audience data, which is made up mainly of analytics usage data. In this talk we will take a tour or how we've been improving the data warehouse performance and how we created a measuring framework which goes beyond AWS metrics.

Blanca Garcia Gil is a Principal Systems Engineer at BBC. She currently works on a team whose aim is to provide a reliable platform at petabyte scale for data engineering and machine learning. She leads a team focused on improving access to data and making sure the data warehouse is performant and reliable for business critical workloads.

Prior to the BBC she has had a variety of roles from developing web applications for an agency, mobile prototyping (before smartphones came about!), developing a content management system or writing highly scalable APIs. She always enjoyed working closer to the backend and since she started developing in the Cloud she took on the challenge of learning about infrastructure. This has led to her deciding to move to an infrastructure automation, performance and reliability role.

Panel Discussion:

Details coming soon

If you are interested in speaking at one of our events please check out our call for papers here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-x7wCrPgmgBvmldT095aAyu9gTm0JjE0ioJlhdG4c1EOUMg/viewform

We are advocates for greater inclusion & diversity in UK Tech and are especially keen to receive talk submissions from people in underrepresented groups. If you are interested in speaking at a future meetup but would like to discuss what to expect or need assistance please contact our Inclusion & Diversity Lead Natalie Gray at graynataliej@gmail.com or DM her @natjgray (https://twitter.com/natjgray)

Remember to follow us @AWSUserGroupUK (https://twitter.com/AWSUserGroupUK) for the latest updates and you can find videos of our past meetups here (http://bit.ly/2dZnvEE).