DevFest Lagos 2024

We set out to celebrate the developer ecosystem at this time of the year. DevFest brings together the developer ecosystem to celebrate the various components of the software (and, lately, even the embedded) space.

You can find all sorts of tracks at DevFest: mobile, web, databases, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, wellness, and many more too numerous to mention. This year's event was hosted over two days, with the first day having 1,700 signups and the second having 2,500. There were five breakout rooms at this year's event.

Artificial Intelligence is all the rage now, and it's easy to talk about generative AI and other similar things. However, all too often, we overlook the infrastructure that all of our code runs on.

I recently had to migrate some legacy code onto more managed infrastructure on the cloud, which caused me to face various challenges. When you work on the cloud, one of the things that you have to deal with is the request to keep costs down. This is, of course, a reasonable request. To keep costs down, I have had to closely examine the various platforms available for Compute Engine instances on GCP. This led to my presentation at DevFest Lagos.

My presentation was titled "Scale Out Your DevOps with T2A Machine Types".

T2A Compute Engine instances used to be the only Arm -based servers on the Google Cloud Platform. The T2A machine types utilize Ampere Altra processors. A week before DevFest Lagos, Google Cloud announced Google Axion processors and compute engine instances based on those. What's special about arm-based processors is that they utilize reduced instruction set computing, which leads to lower power consumption and fewer cooling requirements. This naturally translates to cost savings for users.

My presentation dug into our default way of spinning Kubernetes clusters and then looked at the price difference if you used a T2A machine type. The most important thing about my session was that many people didn't know about T2A machine types or the potential cost savings available to them.

There is much to say about embracing Arm-based servers for your workload. I suggest you look into them if you haven't already done so.

I was on an Ask-Me-Anything panel hosted for current Google Developer Experts. I answered a few questions about my developer journey, the state of AI, breaking into the job market, and managing difficult bosses.

Arm was a sponsor at this year's event. A huge thank you to Shola Akinrolie for his effort in making this happen.

We had a banner with information about the Arm Developer Program and gave swag to people who joined the program. We had over 100 signups during the event. I must appreciate Derrick Sosoo and Peter Ing for all their work in managing the crowd and answering the question, "What is Arm?"

What's next after DevFest Lagos? It will take some time, but I expect to see an increase in awareness and adoption of Arm-based servers. I also expect more backend developers to start thinking about how their code is deployed. Hey, we even have companies that have to utilize on-prem servers. What if they deployed Arm-based servers such as those from System76 ?

Thanks for reading my article, and please keep an eye out for my next outing.