Andrew Beacock's Blog

Last Thursday saw the seventh AWS User Group Liverpool meetup in the wonderful Tapestry building in Liverpool. This month's topic was on AWS Lambdas  and lessons learnt from trying to use them for everything. There was twelve of us in total which was better than the five last month and due to the numbers and the informal setting some great conversation and topic discussions happened. It was great to see everyone chipping in with information and sharing experiences, really brings a great deal of value to these meetups rather than just presenters talking to the room. We started the evening with drinks and pizza and lots of conversation amongst the attendees. The Dominos pizza went down a treat as did the couple of cans of IPA. As always the evening started with "What's new in AWS this month" presented by Simon this month, which is actually a really good idea because Amazon are bringing out new components and services all the time and it's hard to keep u...

The 26th September saw the return of Lancashire Tech Talks a meetup group run by  Andy Norton and HoiYen Sihapanya in Blackburn. The topics were Docker and migrating to the cloud. HoiYen has been involved with running all eight of the meetups and as I've recently taken over the Liverpool Software Architecture meetup I was keen to pick her brains about how to run a successful meetup evening. Some beers and soft drinks were on ice when we arrived and lots of people were stood around in small groups catching up with old work colleagues or just networking to make new friends.  After a brief introduction and run through of the format of the evening it was time for the first talk. Docker: Lies to Children - Jamie Taylor Jamie's talk was on DevOps and Docker. He ran through where DevOps has come from, explaining about the  Toyota Production System ,  Kaizen  and The Three Ways  as techniques to help speed up learning and improving processes. ...

I've been interested in AWS since it was released and read up on EC2, S3 and SQS but never really had much need to really get into them. I have been using S3 storage for around ten years as a bucket in which to store my podcast recordings but that was it. Out of the three major cloud providers (Amazon, Google & Microsoft) I've always felt an affinity with AWS, probably born out of the fact that it was the first one that I read into. On browsing Meetup recently I came across the AWS User Group Liverpool and so attended the meetup on Thursday. Although thirteen people had signed up for it there was a total of five of us there, two of which were the meetup organisers! I still don't understand why more people don't attend these free events, there was pizza and beer, like-minded folk and good content as well as having a chance to chat with some of the DoES people and see what they are building. This evening's presentation was by  Paul Gledhill . He gave...