My experience speaking at an Amazon Cloud Seminar in Dubai

As of now, I’ve spoken at a number of internal company events and nerd-fests in educational institutions. Most of these have been strictly technical demonstrations of DevOps and Automation projects or purely tutorial gigs. By no means I'm an accomplished or well-known tech speaker. However, I have discovered, the introvert in me disappears once I get on stage! This experience of speaking at a large scale AWS event was very fulfilling, so I decided to pen down the experience and what transpired in the event. Before we get into the nitty-gritty, here are some flashes of the presentation I delivered, unfortunately, I do not have a video recorded version nor good photographs. Well working as a DevOps Manager at STARZPLAY, I am responsible for the performance and scalability across the core building blocks of STARZPLAY Cloud Platform. Even-though we are hosted on multiple cloud platforms, AWS is where the biggest chunk our services reside. So naturally, we have a lot of interaction with AWS Architects and Engineers with whom we work together to build and improve this platform. So it all began with one of such mail interactions where we were invited for an AWS Containers Day Seminar to share our experiences. And the schedule looked promising! As I expressed my desire to join the event, I was approached by the AWS folks to deliver a lecture in the event about how we developed the STARZPLAY Cloud Platform and moved from monolith to microservices based architecture, what were the challenges we faced and how using container and ECS we bailed ourselves out of the performance issues to serve millions of active subscribers assuring service reliability. This was a great opportunity to revisit the architecture, think and document the steps we did and how we evolved over time to build the technology stack we have now. I loved the experience preparing the slides and getting ready for the talk, it helped me re-live the experience and remembering the milestones, failures and successes! Here are some of the slides that I presented. I am not writing the transcript here, that can be a blog post for another day. And finally, once the talk was delivered, it garnered very good responses from the hundreds of attendees and I saw a lot of forks on my Github repo after this event and a lot of connections requests on my LinkedIn profile. So lots of networking now in the Dubai DevOps circles!  I was appreciated by the Senior Technical Account Manager of AWS, Middle East and  North Africa, here's a mail in this regard. And I was given an Amazon Echo dot as a token of appreciation, thanks folks! Finally, I thank my DevOps Team at STARZPLAY, Dubai without whom I stand nowhere. And I thank my superiors especially, Saleem Bhatti, Faraz Arshad and the awesome people at AWS, MENA - Zeid, Keerthi and Paul. I look forward to more such sessions in the future.