Front Row Seat At The Amazon Web Services Start-Up Event

I just got back from attending one of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-Up Events. This one was held at the PlugandPlayTechCenter in Sunnyvale, CA. I was pleasantly surprised at the content and presentations and would recommend attendance by anyone doing development and QA. You'll learn a lot about "cloud computing" and the very flexible offerings from Amazon.

One use of cloud computing, particularly with AWS, that I heard in every presentation, was sandboxing. This concept should resonant well for developers and testers alike, if for no other reason than convenience. Too often we find ourselves unable to test something because of a lack of servers, or because the only system we can test on is a production system. And this is usually a problem because the cost of setting up a separate test system is prohibitive. Not so with AWS servers. Everyone who spoke on this subject credited AWS with saving them development time and cost because of the "self-service" and "only pay for what you need" nature of AWS. Developers from ShareThis, Pathwork Diagnostics, Netflix and SmugBug talked about how easy it is for them to bring up an AWS server configuration to experiment with codes changes before committing to their build system. That's a great way to test, knowing that you won't hurt the production server. And at 10 cents an hour, it's a bargain to fire up a dozen different server configurations and test on them for the day. All for less than $10, you can test your server running under different OS versions, or load test your server, using a bunch of Apache JMeter machines, all in the cloud. And when you're done, you shut them all down and stop incurring any more costs than needed.

If you haven't looked into AWS, you're missing an opportunity to improve your development and testing strategy. The days of large IT staffs, server provisioning, high costs and time delays may be a thing of the past for companies that commit to the cloud from the beginning.

A bonus of attending this event was the opportunity to meet up with interesting people. In particular, I meet Matson Wade who has built a web service that runs on AWS. It's called Biibop and it's a service for music lovers. The idea is cool and you need to check it out yourself to really appreciate it. It's still in beta with more features to come. Click here to learn about Biibop.