AWSome Day Athens 2018

Last week I’ve attended the AWSome Day Athens 2018 (huge thanks to Qobo for the opportunity).  There aren’t that many technology events in Cyprus, so I’m constantly on the lookout for events in Europe.

AWSome Day Athens is part of the Amazon’s AWSome Day Global Series, which are one day events organized all throughout the world.  The events are usually for a single day, featuring the speakers from both Amazon AWS team and some of their prominent clients from the area.  AWSome Day Athens 2018 was done in partnership with Beat.

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Creating a 1.3 Million vCPU Grid on AWS using EC2 Spot Instances and TIBCO GridServer

This Amazon AWS blog post provides a great insight into the benefits of the cloud computing in general and Amazon AWS in particular.  The whole thing is well worth the read, but here are a few of my favorite bits.

The scale:

The grid grew to 61,299 Spot Instances (1.3 million vCPUs drawn from 34 instance types spanning 3 generations of EC2 hardware) as planned, with just 1,937 instances reclaimed and automatically replaced during the run, and cost $30,000 per hour to run, at an average hourly cost of $0.078 per vCPU. If the same instances had been used in On-Demand form, the hourly cost to run the grid would have been approximately $93,000.

The size of the Amazon AWS customers:

1.3 million vCPUs (5x the size of the largest on-premises grid)

The evolution of computing power over the last few years:

To give you a sense of the compute power, we computed that this grid would have taken the #1 position on the TOP 500 supercomputer list in November 2007 by a considerable margin, and the #2 position in June 2008. Today, it would occupy position #360 on the list.

Now, just for fun, exercise the idea of building something like this in house…

PHP application logging with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Monolog

AWS Developer Blog ran this post a while back – “PHP application logging with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Monolog“, in which they show how to use Monolog and Amazon CloudWatch together in any PHP application.  It goes beyond a basic configuration of connecting the two, all the way into setting up log metrics, etc.