This week Amazon opened a loft in Berlin which is suppose to be open for 4 weeks. The loft is currently on pilot and there are several other lofts around the world. I think it is a very good strategic call to have it in Berlin as the startup is a emerging and many people want to try and learn more about cloud services while the hands-on experience is sometimes limited.
So what is going on in the loft? It is open everyday 10-18 and there is amazon employee “in duty” which you can consult with regarding AWS services. A very inviting work space. And workshops, demos, bootcamp, etc. All, of course, related to AWS services.
I took part in two workshops on Thursday morning – “An overview of Hadoop & Spark, using Amazon Elastic MapReduce” and “Processing streams of data with Amazon Kinesis (and other tools)“. Both lectures were given by Michael Hanisch, solution architect at Amazon. The first talk was a bit messy as it covered many topics but eventually ended up jumping here and there between general things about Hadoop, tips about EMR and changes in the AMI concepts and versioning and clues about Spark.
The second talk was much more focused. It started by introducing the need to Amazon Kinesis. Then explaining the architecture – producer, streams, shards, clients, clearing up the capabilities and constraints also mentioning kinesis autoscaling utils.. The next step was a deeper dive to kinesis producer library and kinesis client library. Moving forward to kinesis firehose (which was introduced in the re:invent last week) and integration with additional input and output sources and aws services. To sum up the talk ended with tips and best practices. AWS Lambda was also mentioned several times over the talk as a tool to process stream data.
Quite exciting time to be in Berlin.
Tom Ron 