Chaos Engineering & AWS CloudShell

Our CTO, Tony Rost, sat down with engineering manager Nathan Wilkerson to talk about his key takeaways from this year’s re:Invent.

Q: What sessions did you go to? What was your favorite?

A: I got to see a lot of them, but my favorite was Warner Vogel’s keynote. I always like that he unveils the services that are useful to the frontline employees. This year it was their chaos engineering and CloudShell—those were the two that got on my radar. I’ve already had a chance to try the CloudShell out, and it works great.

And then they always have the best user stories, in my opinion, about their clients and what they’re building. In particular, about Ava doing some really cool stuff with medical and machine learning, and Lego and how they used Amazon to improve their processes.

Q: What are some of your big takeaways?

A: My takeaways here, and things that we can apply to clients, are that we can now leverage things like CloudShell to reduce our footprint in the cloud, thus saving money there. And we can use chaos engineering to leverage stuff for our smaller clients that previously only larger companies were able to use.

Q: Yes, chaos engineering is something I’d love to learn more about. What is a use case you can see for one of our midsize accounts?

A: We’re hosting awards shows all the time for clients, and they want to know that if something happens during the show, their site can stay up. Setting up chaos engineering during the regular course of the year to shut off things randomly, and proving that the site is still stable, is a really good card for the time they have to shine. We can turn that off and they know it’s gonna stay up if anything happens to them.

Q: Last question for you, Nathan. What do you think of the virtual AWS re:Invent?

A: Virtual AWS re:Invent was super exciting. It was especially exciting because we got to extend it to more of the team, since we didn’t have all the travel costs associated with it.

Q: Yes, that was good. Nathan, it was great to talk to you. I’m looking forward to AWS re:Invent again next year.

A: Thank you, Tony; it’s been a pleasure.

AWS re:Invent is one of the most informative conferences to attend for anyone looking to the future of business and cloud—and as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we look forward to it every year. For 2020, re:Invent was transformed into a free, fully online event packed with exciting sessions, and one silver lining of the remote event was that every Toad could attend!