Recently, the team at Pulse attended the Amazon Web Services summit in London, at the Excel Centre. It was an event filled with training and capability sessions, new technologies and a whole load of support for users already on AWS.

One of our favourite sessions was the SageMaker Breakout, showing us how to get started using AWS SageMaker, which allows you to build, train and deploy machine-learning-models at scale – something we are spending a fair bit of time on this year.

There were also a lot of third party vendors at the event, providing new applications and support to applications hosted on AWS.

A section that caught our eye was the Builders Fair- an opportunity to view the various projects that members of the AWS team had worked on. It was fascinating to see how they were using IoT and AWS to make some unique and useful projects.

A few projects stood out from the crowd:

1. A camera that measured what items had been taken off of a shelf and which items it already had on the shelf...a clever way of overcoming the manual task of checking stock levels in a store. Link this up to the order system and you have a fully automated end to end stock management.
2. A lawnmower that used a mini Intel computer in order to track its usage. It logged when the ideal time was to buy new parts, sending this data to AWS for processing and storage which, in turn, could then call an external service to order new parts- a practical and classic example of the huge potential of IoT in helping to remote manage service and maintenance.
3. AWS Macie- a machine learning, security service that discovers, classifies and protects sensitive data. It uses prewritten classifiers to currently discover personally identifiable information in data ingested from S3 buckets. Useful, because you know exactly where you have PII information in data.

Overall, the AWS summit was a great experience for the team and important as we continue to expand our partnership and use of AWS. The event was full of knowledgeable developers and architects, enabling us to ask questions and receive answers, in real-time, about the AWS services we currently use and the ones we are expanding into.

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