An Engineer's Guide To AWS re:Invent 2021

OW Digital Lead Engineer Will Osei , who works on our Platforms and DevOps teams, shares his thoughts about what is interesting and relevant for engineers at AWS re:Invent this week. Read more about what he’s seeing on the ground.

Day one at AWS re:Invent had a packed agenda and did not disappoint. The week-long event is billed as a “learning conference,” therefore as an engineer on both Oliver Wyman’s Platform and DevOps teams, it was good to see the program offers a broad selection of workshops and presentations ranging from best-practice technical advice to sessions covering more innovative and creative topics.

One of the most important aspects of my job is building trust with clients and colleagues, so they can feel confident that our solutions fully meet security, performance, and other non-functional requirements. Monday’s session, “S3 Data Replication Best Practices”, offered some sound advice around compliance and resiliency. Likewise in “Productizing A Serverless Minimal Viable Product (MVP)” we looked at how to address scenarios that ask for quick, lightweight, efficient delivery and ways to stay on task in this design approach. This all illustrates the importance of adopting flexible and resilient technology approaches, which we call technology dexterity , and having the knowledge required to adapt to different situations.

One of the most rewarding aspects of my role is problem solving, in particular seeing creativity and innovation come together to formulate the missing piece to a puzzle. For this reason, I was really excited to attend a session on “Rapid Transition From An Innovative Idea To Delightful Solutions”. Many factors can change over the course of a project; technology itself evolves so rapidly and often the project scope and requirements will also change drastically. For engineers, communication is the critical factor, so having an open dialogue channel to listen to clients is essential, to enable you to gather feedback from different stakeholders, including end users. This allows us to rethink and adapt our solution as needed over time. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that sometimes it's ok to not have an immediate answer to a problem. Instead, take time to listen to details and requirements from a given scenario and piece those things together.

My top tip for the rest of the week? I am anticipating gaining some insider tips on how Amazon approaches solutions themselves, such as their DevSecOps session on Wednesday. DevOps and DevSecOps practices have no universal definition as every organization translates them based on their needs. Amazon has had a large number of contributions to both DevOps and DevSecOps practices, and I look forward to gathering valuable insights from their approaches and success stories.?

View more AWS re:Invent recaps on the Oliver Wyman website .