AWS Summit Paris 2019 Recap

This day dedicated to the AWS cloud brought together partners and the public around cloud topics and made innovation more accessible!

The opening Keynote, introduced by Julien Grouès, CEO of AWS France, proved revealing of the potential of the French digital world, which has been growing over the years: only 300 participants 7 years ago compared to over 7,000 today, 30 customer testimonials and 70 sponsors. Experience reports from prestigious companies across diverse industries accompanied the French AWS CEO's speech and marked the opening of this day of collaboration.

It was also an opportunity for French AWS communities to gather around a booth to exchange and share their knowledge with visitors at the Palais des Congrès. Always a convivial moment, the AWS User Groups are a way to increase your knowledge and share experience reports or workshops around AWS. You can easily find one near you! If you are in Lyon, don't hesitate to join the group!

The AWS Summit Paris 2019 also marked the launch of the autonomous racing championship: the DeepRacer League was animated throughout the day by commentator Marc Chavet. The DeepRacer League race consists of driving a mini-car piloted using reinforcement learning, an advanced part of Machine Learning. The goal is to complete laps with the shortest possible time!

Two of our Teamwork colleagues took on the challenge hoping to win the AWS DeepRacer Cup with mixed success. A race victory would secure a spot for the grand finale at re:Invent 2019 in the United States.

We also participated in the AWS GameDay on Monday, April 1st! One day before the AWS Summit Paris began, TeamWork was there to take on the challenge. The GameDay objective is to solve a given problem with well-defined AWS resources. For this session, 3 applications had to be deployed and points were awarded based on the success or failure of requests. Special attention was paid to the scalability of the whole system to withstand any load. "Everything fails all the time," as AWS CTO Werner Vogels says, and part of this challenge was reflected in the project to be completed!

Teams had to constantly monitor and verify the proper functioning of their infrastructure, which was being disrupted by a group that could change certain configurations (such as routing tables...). Our team demonstrated its efficiency: within the 2.5-hour timeframe, Jeremy, Marouen and Yahya secured second place in the competition on their first participation!