Here we are, excited after joining the CloudConf 2022 event in Turin. This year’s edition, finally organized as an in-person conference after the covid19-pandemic, saw hundreds of professionals and developers from all around Italy gathering at the local Lingotto Congress Center.
Now: what is CloudConf? Let’s put it shortly: a day full of engaging activities, networking, and talks dedicated to Cloud Computing. Among the different sub-topics (from development to operations), Sustainability & Green-computing were definitely in the spotlight: the main goal here was to evaluate strategies, actions and design choices in order to grant better energy efficiency for the solutions adopted when dealing with the Cloud.
Going into detail, our day started with the opening keynote by F. Bertani, Associate Solution Architect @ AWS. In his talk “Good old serverless, now in sustainable green”, he showed to the audience different techniques to improve performance and reduce costs within the AWS Lambda serverless ecosystem. An interesting starting point is the use of Rust to reduce the footprint of applications, as well as the use of good old profilers, especially AWS CodeGuru, where the use of JVM-based languages is unavoidable.
Another talk focused on energy efficiency was the one by A. VIvaldi, DevOps Architect @ Vista Technology: “Observability and security in the days of containers”. Vivaldi showed to the audience how the use of eBPF can enormously broaden horizons when dealing with system observability, while not compromising performance.
In the following sessions, many other topics were discussed. Just to name a few, A. Messidda, Production Engineer @ Meta, presented in his interesting talk “Similarity Detection in Online Integrity” the evolution of solutions to moderate contents (especially the visual ones) within online communities. For instance, Messidda showed the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence solutions developed by Microsoft and Meta to fight child sexual abuse, revenge porn and many other illegal activities.
Equally interesting was the brilliant contribution by W. Dal Mut, Solution Architect @ Corley. In his talk “How to build a realtime system with AWS IoT Core”, Dal Mut described how to implement a realtime system (such as a messaging system), using an AWS solution properly designed for IoT, but equally applicable to use-cases that are very different from Industry 4.0 and home automation. The use of AWS IoT Core as a websocket server completely managed by the Vendor, in particular, leads to interesting integration possibilities.
Among the contributions purely dedicated to architecture and development, we must highlight the one by U. Lattanzi, Software Services Team Leader. Lattanzi showed the foundations to develop scalable microservice and cloud-oriented architectures, pointing out that a good architecture is the result of a team working together (architect, cloud engineer, data engineer, security and dev leaders), on a continuously evolving project. The speaker also shared his personal check-list used to evaluate the design of the microservices implemented by his team. Of course, this list does not represent a master key that can be used for all situations unconditionally. Nevertheless, we should take it as good advice.
Last but not least, we were impressed by F. Sciuti, CEO @ Devmy, even though his talk was more focused on Front-end topics. More specifically, Sciuti delved into the functioning mechanisms of modern browsers: from the complexity hiding behind their ease-of-use to their ever increasing need for hardware resources. What about the connection to the Cloud? Well, in this case we must talk about “browser-isolation”: an upcoming technology, in which the final user will interact with the Web thanks to “light browsers” that will only display and send the interactions to a “centralized” browser (which may be in the cloud). This latter one will manage the hard work, granting a higher level of security within the company intranets and less waste of resources.
To find out more about the event’s key sessions and top speakers, please visit https://2022.cloudconf.it/
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Authors: Simone Ripamonti, Team Lead Engineering @Bitrock – Danilo Ventura, Sr Software Engineer @ProActivity
