AWS User Group Meetup @ AWS Pop-Up Loft

Hi guys!

Sorry for getting the agenda together pretty late, it's been a busy month.

First -- yes, we are meeting! I just left the "This is a placeholder" text up a little too long.

We'll be meeting at the AWS Pop-Up Loft on the 5th floor of the Amazon Development Center.

We'll have a couple of visitors this month -- Paul Sorensen from HotelTonight in San Francisco, and Ian Massingham, one of our AWS Evangelists from the UK.

The Loft is running until Nov. 13th, and has a nice coworking space as well as quite a few technical sessions (Ian is running Masterclasses on EC2 & S3 that afternoon), so feel free to drop by earlier in the day. Info + schedule: https://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/loft/de-loft/

Hope to see you all there!

====

Agenda:

* What's new with Amazon EC2 Container Service -- Ian Massingham, AWS Evangelist (visiting from Manchester)

* How HotelTonight uses Elasticsearch to power its hotel search algorithm -- Paul Sorensen, HotelTonight Platform Engineer (visiting from San Francisco)

* Group Discussion / Socialising

====

Session / Speaker Abstracts:

"How HotelTonight uses Elasticsearch to power its hotel search algorithm"
To handle exponential data growth, the need for 24x7 availability and requirements to serve up real-time results for its round-the-clock user base, HotelTonight’s engineering and platform team was faced with the challenge of architecting their systems for high-performance and scale, while focusing on their core competency: building an intelligent mobile travel application. With a MySQL backend, HotelTonight looked to Elasticsearch for handling its search functionality based on Elasticsearch’s Lucene background and its proven, developer friendly APIs. This was important as every search query must compare millions of documents containing diverse data elements to display real-time results for end users to select their hotel stays.

Paul Sorensen is a Platform Engineer at HotelTonight. We moved him from Chicago, where he was building Rails web apps, digging deeper into Elasticsearch, and enjoying American football, to join the team in San Francisco. He now keeps busy scaling HotelTonight’s infrastructure to support massive data demands, within a constantly changing real-time marketplace servicing millions of requests per day. You can find Paul taking his breaks at the ping-pong table or playing fútbol with the HotelTonight team.