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Cloudtech Has Earned AWS Advanced Tier Partner Status

We’re honored to announce that Cloudtech has officially secured AWS Advanced Tier Partner status within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network!

Oct 10, 2024
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8 MIN READ

We’re honored to announce that Cloudtech has officially secured AWS Advanced Tier Partner status within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network! This significant achievement highlights our expertise in AWS cloud modernization and reinforces our commitment to delivering transformative solutions for our clients.

As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, Cloudtech has been recognized for its exceptional capabilities in cloud data, application, and infrastructure modernization. This milestone underscores our dedication to excellence and our proven ability to leverage AWS technologies for outstanding results.

A Message from Our CEO

“Achieving AWS Advanced Tier Partner status is a pivotal moment for Cloudtech,” said Kamran Adil, CEO. “This recognition not only validates our expertise in delivering advanced cloud solutions but also reflects the hard work and dedication of our team in harnessing the power of AWS services.”

What This Means for Us

To reach Advanced Tier Partner status, Cloudtech demonstrated an in-depth understanding of AWS services and a solid track record of successful, high-quality implementations. This achievement comes with enhanced benefits, including advanced technical support, exclusive training resources, and closer collaboration with AWS sales and marketing teams.

Elevating Our Cloud Offerings

With our new status, Cloudtech is poised to enhance our cloud solutions even further. We provide a range of services, including:

  • Data Modernization
  • Application Modernization
  • Infrastructure and Resiliency Solutions

By utilizing AWS’s cutting-edge tools and services, we equip startups and enterprises with scalable, secure solutions that accelerate digital transformation and optimize operational efficiency.

We're excited to share this news right after the launch of our new website and fresh branding! These updates reflect our commitment to innovation and excellence in the ever-changing cloud landscape. Our new look truly captures our mission: to empower businesses with personalized cloud modernization solutions that drive success. We can't wait for you to explore it all!

Stay tuned as we continue to innovate and drive impactful outcomes for our diverse client portfolio.

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Cloudtech Has Earned AWS Advanced Tier Partner Status

Oct 10, 2024
-
8 MIN READ

We’re honored to announce that Cloudtech has officially secured AWS Advanced Tier Partner status within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network! This significant achievement highlights our expertise in AWS cloud modernization and reinforces our commitment to delivering transformative solutions for our clients.

As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, Cloudtech has been recognized for its exceptional capabilities in cloud data, application, and infrastructure modernization. This milestone underscores our dedication to excellence and our proven ability to leverage AWS technologies for outstanding results.

A Message from Our CEO

“Achieving AWS Advanced Tier Partner status is a pivotal moment for Cloudtech,” said Kamran Adil, CEO. “This recognition not only validates our expertise in delivering advanced cloud solutions but also reflects the hard work and dedication of our team in harnessing the power of AWS services.”

What This Means for Us

To reach Advanced Tier Partner status, Cloudtech demonstrated an in-depth understanding of AWS services and a solid track record of successful, high-quality implementations. This achievement comes with enhanced benefits, including advanced technical support, exclusive training resources, and closer collaboration with AWS sales and marketing teams.

Elevating Our Cloud Offerings

With our new status, Cloudtech is poised to enhance our cloud solutions even further. We provide a range of services, including:

  • Data Modernization
  • Application Modernization
  • Infrastructure and Resiliency Solutions

By utilizing AWS’s cutting-edge tools and services, we equip startups and enterprises with scalable, secure solutions that accelerate digital transformation and optimize operational efficiency.

We're excited to share this news right after the launch of our new website and fresh branding! These updates reflect our commitment to innovation and excellence in the ever-changing cloud landscape. Our new look truly captures our mission: to empower businesses with personalized cloud modernization solutions that drive success. We can't wait for you to explore it all!

Stay tuned as we continue to innovate and drive impactful outcomes for our diverse client portfolio.

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Cloudtech's Approach to People-Centric Data Modernization for Mid-Market Leaders

Sep 2, 2024
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8 MIN READ

Engineering leaders at mid-market organizations are facing a significant challenge: managing complex data systems while juggling rapid growth and outdated technologies. Many of these organizations left their former on-premises ecosystems for greener pastures in the cloud without fully understanding the impact of this change. This shift has created issues from higher-than-expected cloud costs to engineers who are unprepared to turn over control to cloud providers. These new challenges are not only highly technical but also deeply human, affecting teams and processes at every level. Cloudtech understands these challenges and addresses them with a unique approach combining a people-centric focus paired with an iterative delivery mechanism ensuring transparency throughout the entire engagement.

Embracing a People-Centric Approach

At the heart of Cloudtech's philosophy is a simple truth: technology should serve people, not the other way around. This people-centric approach begins with a deep understanding of the needs, challenges, and capabilities of your team. Based on our findings, we are able to create customized solutions to fit your organization’s data infrastructure modernization goals. By focusing on this human aspect, Cloudtech ensures that our solutions don't just solve technical problems but also support and empower the people who spend their lives ensuring organizations have the right technology solutions to grow and support business needs. 

Iterative, Tangible Improvements

Our “base hits” approach terminology comes from baseball, where base hits, though seemingly small, lead to significant victories. Cloudtech adopts a similar philosophy when we engage with our customers. This base hits approach is about consistent, manageable progress that accumulates over time. For your team, this means a sense of continuous achievement and motivation, allowing you to measure progress at every stage. 

A Different Kind of Company 

At Cloudtech, we are redefining the essence of professional services in the cloud industry. Our foundation is built on the expertise of engineering leaders who intimately understand the pressures of the role. Our mission is to assist mid-market companies to get the most out of their data, helping them centralize and modernize their data infrastructure to improve decision making and prepare them for a Generative AI future. We accomplish this by leveraging AWS serverless solutions to help our customers improve operational efficiency, reduce infrastructure management and lower their cloud costs. 

Ready to get the most out of your data?

Discover how our unique delivery approach can streamline your processes, lower your cloud costs and help you feel confident about the current and future state of your organization’s technology.

Take the first step to modernizing your data infrastructure. 


Schedule a Consultation | Learn More About Our Solutions

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Cloudtech and ReluTech: Your North Star in Navigating the VMware Acquisition

Jul 3, 2024
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8 MIN READ

In the wake of the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, the virtualization landscape has witnessed a monumental shift, sparking concerns across industries about rising costs and operational impacts. Many businesses are actively seeking robust solutions to manage these challenges effectively. 

Amidst this turbulence, the migration towards cloud-based alternatives has emerged as a compelling strategy for future-proofing IT infrastructures. This migration isn't merely about responding to market shifts; it's about embracing the agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency offered by cloud environments. As the industry continues to evolve, leveraging cloud-based solutions becomes not just a necessity but a strategic advantage for businesses aiming to thrive in the digital age. 

An Innovative Approach

Recognizing the urgency and complexity of this transition, Cloudtech and ReluTech, two AWS partners, have joined forces to present a forward-thinking approach to mitigate risks, optimize costs, and embrace the scalability of AWS cloud technologies. Our collaborative Migration and Hardware Buy-Back/Lease-Back Program aims to alleviate the financial burden associated with transitioning from VMware to AWS while ensuring uninterrupted business operations and optimized performance.

Key Features of the Program:

  • Expert Migration Services: Streamlined processes for a swift and seamless migration to AWS, minimizing downtime and ensuring a smooth transition of workloads.
  • Elastic Maintenance: Enjoy significant savings—up to 80%—on maintenance costs throughout the migration period. This innovative cost-saving model is facilitated through the AWS Marketplace, ensuring transparency and efficiency.
  • IT Asset Disposition (ITAD): Compliant decommissioning and recycling of outdated hardware, aligning with environmental standards while facilitating a smooth transition to modern cloud infrastructure.
  • Hardware Buy-Back/Lease-Back Options: Exchange your existing hardware for cash, providing a financial boost to fund your cloud migration initiatives effectively.

Why Choose Cloudtech and ReluTech?

Both Cloudtech and ReluTech are distinguished AWS partners renowned for their expertise in cloud migration and infrastructure optimization. By leveraging our combined experience and comprehensive service offerings, businesses can confidently navigate the complexities of transitioning from VMware to AWS. This partnership not only ensures cost-effective solutions but also sets the stage for long-term success in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

If you're concerned about the impact of the VMware acquisition on your business, exploring cloud-based alternatives with trusted partners like Cloudtech and ReluTech could be your pathway to resilience and growth. 

Embrace the future of virtualization with confidence—let us get you on the path to AWS today. 

Gets started with your VMware cloud migration

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Supercharge Your Data Architecture with the Latest AWS Step Functions Integrations

Mar 8, 2024
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8 MIN READ

In the rapidly evolving cloud computing landscape, AWS Step Functions has emerged as a cornerstone for developers looking to orchestrate complex, distributed applications seamlessly in serverless implementations. The recent expansion of AWS SDK integrations marks a significant milestone, introducing support for 33 additional AWS services, including cutting-edge tools like Amazon Q, AWS B2B Data Interchange, AWS Bedrock, Amazon Neptune,  and Amazon CloudFront KeyValueStore, etc. This enhancement not only broadens the horizon for application development but also opens new avenues for serverless data processing.

Serverless computing has revolutionized the way we build and scale applications, offering a way to execute code in response to events without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. With the latest updates to AWS Step Functions, developers now have at their disposal a more extensive toolkit for creating serverless workflows that are not only scalable but also cost-efficient and less prone to errors.

In this blog, we will delve into the benefits and practical applications of these new integrations, with a special focus on serverless data processing. Whether you're managing massive datasets, streamlining business processes, or building real-time analytics solutions, the enhanced capabilities of AWS Step Functions can help you achieve more with less code. By leveraging these integrations, you can create workflows that directly invoke over 11,000+ API actions from more than 220 AWS services, simplifying the architecture and accelerating development cycles.

Practical Applications in Data Processing:


This AWS SDK integration with 33 new services not only broadens the scope of potential applications within the AWS ecosystem but also streamlines the execution of a wide range of data processing tasks. These integrations empower businesses with automated AI-driven data processing, streamlined EDI document handling, and enhanced content delivery performance.

Amazon Q Integration: Amazon Q is a generative AI-powered enterprise chat assistant designed to enhance employee productivity in various business operations. The integration of Amazon Q with AWS Step Functions enhances workflow automation by leveraging AI-driven data processing. This integration allows for efficient knowledge discovery, summarization, and content generation across various business operations. It enables quick and intuitive data analysis and visualization, particularly beneficial for business intelligence. In customer service, it provides real-time, data-driven solutions, improving efficiency and accuracy. It also offers insightful responses to complex queries, facilitating data-informed decision-making.

AWS B2B Data Interchange: Integrating AWS B2B Data Interchange with AWS Step Functions streamlines and automates electronic data interchange (EDI) document processing in business workflows. This integration allows for efficient handling of transactions including order fulfillment and claims processing. The low-code approach simplifies EDI onboarding, enabling businesses to utilize processed data in applications and analytics quickly. This results in improved management of trading partner relationships and real-time integration with data lakes, enhancing data accessibility for analysis. The detailed logging feature aids in error detection and provides valuable transaction insights, essential for managing business disruptions and risks.

Amazon CloudFront KeyValueStore: This integration enhances content delivery networks by providing fast, reliable access to data across global networks. It's particularly beneficial for businesses that require quick access to large volumes of data distributed worldwide, ensuring that the data is always available where and when it's needed.

Neptune Data: This integration allows the Processing of graph data in a serverless environment, ideal for applications that require complex relationships and data patterns like social networks, recommendation engines, and knowledge graphs. For instance, Step Functions can orchestrate a series of tasks that ingest data into Neptune, execute graph queries, analyze the results, and then trigger other services based on those results, such as updating a dashboard or triggering alerts.

Amazon Timestream Query & Write: The integration is useful in serverless architectures for analyzing high-volume time-series data in real-time, such as sensor data, application logs, and financial transactions. Step Functions can manage the flow of data from ingestion (using Timestream Write) to analysis (using Timestream Query), including data transformation, anomaly detection, and triggering actions based on analytical insights.

Amazon Bedrock & Bedrock Runtime: AWS Step Functions can orchestrate complex data streaming and processing pipelines that ingest data in real-time, perform transformations, and route data to various analytics tools or storage systems. Step Functions can manage the flow of data across different Bedrock tasks, handling error retries, and parallel processing efficiently

AWS Elemental MediaPackage V2: Step Functions can orchestrate video processing workflows that package, encrypt, and deliver video content, including invoking MediaPackage V2 actions to prepare video streams, monitoring encoding jobs, and updating databases or notification systems upon completion. 

AWS Data Exports: With Step Functions, you can sequence tasks such as triggering data export actions, monitoring their progress, and executing subsequent data processing or notification steps upon completion. It can automate data export workflows that aggregate data from various sources, transform it, and then export it to a data lake or warehouse.

Benefits of the New Integrations

The recent integrations within AWS Step Functions bring forth a multitude of benefits that collectively enhance the efficiency, scalability, and reliability of data processing and workflow management systems. These advancements simplify the architectural complexity, reduce the necessity for custom code, and ensure cost efficiency, thereby addressing some of the most pressing challenges in modern data processing practices. Here's a summary of the key benefits:

Simplified Architecture: The new service integrations streamline the architecture of data processing systems, reducing the need for complex orchestration and manual intervention.

Reduced Code Requirement: With a broader range of integrations, less custom code is needed, facilitating faster deployment, lower development costs, and reduced error rates.

Cost Efficiency: By optimizing workflows and reducing the need for additional resources or complex infrastructure, these integrations can lead to significant cost savings.

Enhanced Scalability: The integrations allow systems to easily scale, accommodating increasing data loads and complex processing requirements without the need for extensive reconfiguration.

Improved Data Management: These integrations offer better control and management of data flows, enabling more efficient data processing, storage, and retrieval.

Increased Flexibility: With a wide range of services now integrated with AWS Step Functions, businesses have more options to tailor their workflows to specific needs, increasing overall system flexibility.

Faster Time-to-Insight: The streamlined processes enabled by these integrations allow for quicker data processing, leading to faster time-to-insight and decision-making.

Enhanced Security and Compliance: Integrating with AWS services ensures adherence to high security and compliance standards, which is essential for sensitive data processing and regulatory requirements.

Easier Integration with Existing Systems: These new integrations make it simpler to connect AWS Step Functions with existing systems and services, allowing for smoother digital transformation initiatives.

Global Reach: Services like Amazon CloudFront KeyValueStore enhance global data accessibility, ensuring high performance across geographical locations.

As businesses continue to navigate the challenges of digital transformation, these new AWS Step Functions integrations offer powerful solutions to streamline operations, enhance data processing capabilities, and drive innovation. At Cloudtech, we specialize in serverless data processing and event-driven architectures. Contact us today and ask how you can realize the benefits of these new AWS Step Functions integrations in your data architecture.

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Revolutionize Your Search Engine with Amazon Personalize and Amazon OpenSearch Service

Feb 20, 2024
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8 MIN READ

In today's digital landscape, user experience is paramount, and search engines play a pivotal role in shaping it. Imagine a world where your search engine not only understands your preferences and needs but anticipates them, delivering results that resonate with you on a personal level. This transformative user experience is made possible by the fusion of Amazon Personalize and Amazon OpenSearch Service. 

Understanding Amazon Personalize

Amazon Personalize is a fully-managed machine learning service that empowers businesses to develop and deploy personalized recommendation systems, search engines, and content recommendation engines. It is part of the AWS suite of services and can be seamlessly integrated into web applications, mobile apps, and other digital platforms.

Key components and features of Amazon Personalize include:

Datasets: Users can import their own data, including user interaction data, item data, and demographic data, to train the machine learning models.

Recipes: Recipes are predefined machine learning algorithms and models that are designed for specific use cases, such as personalized product recommendations, personalized search results, or content recommendations.

Customization: Users have the flexibility to fine-tune and customize their machine learning models, allowing them to align the recommendations with their specific business goals and user preferences.

Real-Time Recommendations: Amazon Personalize can generate real-time recommendations for users based on their current behavior and interactions.

Batch Recommendations: Businesses can also generate batch recommendations for users, making it suitable for email campaigns, content recommendations, and more.

Benefits of Amazon Personalize

Amazon Personalize offers a range of benefits for businesses looking to enhance user experiences and drive engagement. 

Improved User Engagement: By providing users with personalized content and recommendations, Amazon Personalize can significantly increase user engagement rates. 

Higher Conversion Rates: Personalized recommendations often lead to higher conversion rates, as users are more likely to make purchases or engage with desired actions when presented with items or content tailored to their preferences.

Enhanced User Satisfaction: Personalization makes users feel understood and valued, leading to improved satisfaction with your platform. Satisfied users are more likely to become loyal customers.

Better Click-Through Rates (CTR): Personalized recommendations and search results can drive higher CTR as users are drawn to content that aligns with their interests, increasing their likelihood of clicking through to explore further.

Increased Revenue: The improved user engagement and conversion rates driven by Amazon Personalize can help cross-sell and upsell products or services effectively.

Efficient Content Discovery: Users can easily discover relevant content, products, or services, reducing the time and effort required to find what they are looking for.

Data-Driven Decision Making: Amazon Personalize provides valuable insights into user behavior and preferences, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions and optimize their offerings.

Scalability: As an AWS service, Amazon Personalize is highly-scalable and can accommodate businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.

Understanding Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed, open-source search and analytics engine developed to provide fast, scalable, and highly-relevant search results and analytics capabilities. It is based on the open-source Elasticsearch and Kibana projects and is designed to efficiently index, store, and search through vast amounts of data.

Benefits of Amazon OpenSearch Service in Search Enhancement

Amazon OpenSearch Service enhances search functionality in several ways:

High-Performance Search: OpenSearch Service enables organizations to rapidly execute complex queries on large datasets to deliver a responsive and seamless search experience.

Scalability: OpenSearch Service is designed to be horizontally scalable, allowing organizations to expand their search clusters as data and query loads increase, ensuring consistent search performance.

Relevance and Ranking: OpenSearch Service allows developers to customize ranking algorithms to ensure that the most relevant search results are presented to users.

Full-Text Search: OpenSearch Service excels in full-text search, making it well-suited for applications that require searching through text-heavy content such as documents, articles, logs, and more. It supports advanced text analysis and search features, including stemming and synonym matching.

Faceted Search: OpenSearch Service supports faceted search, enabling users to filter search results based on various attributes, categories, or metadata. 

Analytics and Insights: Beyond search, OpenSearch Service offers analytics capabilities, allowing organizations to gain valuable insights into user behavior, query performance, and data trends to inform data-driven decisions and optimizations.

Security: OpenSearch Service offers access control, encryption, and authentication mechanisms to safeguard sensitive data and ensure secure search operations.

Open-Source Compatibility: While Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed service, it remains compatible with open-source Elasticsearch, ensuring that organizations can leverage their existing Elasticsearch skills and applications.

Integration Flexibility: OpenSearch Service can seamlessly integrate with various AWS services and third-party tools, enabling organizations to ingest data from multiple sources and build comprehensive search solutions.

Managed Service: Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully-managed service, which means AWS handles the operational aspects, such as cluster provisioning, maintenance, and scaling, allowing organizations to focus on developing applications and improving user experiences.

Amazon Personalize and Amazon OpenSearch Service Integration

When you use Amazon Personalize with Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Personalize re-ranks OpenSearch Service results based on a user's past behavior, any metadata about the items, and any metadata about the user. OpenSearch Service then incorporates the re-ranking before returning the search response to your application. You control how much weight OpenSearch Service gives the ranking from Amazon Personalize when applying it to OpenSearch Service results.

With this re-ranking, results can be more engaging and relevant to a user's interests. This can lead to an increase in the click-through rate and conversion rate for your application. For example, you might have an ecommerce application that sells cars. If your user enters a query for Toyota cars and you don't personalize results, OpenSearch Service would return a list of cars made by Toyota based on keywords in your data. This list would be ranked in the same order for all users. However, if you were to use Amazon Personalize, OpenSearch Service would re-rank these cars in order of relevance for the specific user based on their behavior so that the car that the user is most likely to click is ranked first.

When you personalize OpenSearch Service results, you control how much weight (emphasis) OpenSearch Service gives the ranking from Amazon Personalize to deliver the most relevant results. For instance, if a user searches for a specific type of car from a specific year (such as a 2008 Toyota Prius), you might want to put more emphasis on the original ranking from OpenSearch Service than from Personalize. However, for more generic queries that result in a wide range of results (such as a search for all Toyota vehicles), you might put a high emphasis on personalization. This way, the cars at the top of the list are more relevant to the particular user.

How the Amazon Personalize Search Ranking plugin works

The following diagram shows how the Amazon Personalize Search Ranking plugin works.

  1. You submit your customer's query to your Amazon OpenSearch Service Cluster 
  2. OpenSearch Service sends the query response  and the user's ID to the Amazon Personalize search ranking plugin.
  3. The plugin sends the items and user information to your Amazon Personalize campaign for ranking. It uses the recipe and campaign Amazon Resource Name (ARN) values within your search process to generate a personalized ranking for the user. This is done using the GetPersonalizedRanking API operation for recommendations. The  user's ID and the items obtained from the OpenSearch Service query are included in the request.
  4. Amazon Personalize returns the re-ranked results to the plugin.
  5. The plugin organizes and returns these search results to your OpenSearch Service cluster. It re-ranks the results based on the feedback from your Amazon Personalize campaign and the emphasis on personalization that you've defined during setup.
  6. Finally, your OpenSearch Service cluster sends the finalized results back to your application.

Benefits of Amazon Personalize and Amazon OpenSearch Service Integration

Combining Amazon Personalize and Amazon OpenSearch Service maximizes user satisfaction through highly personalized search experiences:

Enhanced Relevance: The integration ensures that search results are tailored precisely to individual user preferences and behavior. Users are more likely to find what they are looking for quickly, resulting in a higher level of satisfaction.

Personalized Recommendations: Amazon Personalize's machine learning capabilities enable the generation of personalized recommendations within search results. This feature exposes users to items or content they may not have discovered otherwise, enriching their search experience.

User-Centric Experience: Personalized search results demonstrate that your platform understands and caters to each user's unique needs and preferences. This fosters a sense of appreciation and enhances user satisfaction.

Time Efficiency: Users can efficiently discover relevant content or products, saving time and effort in the search process. 

Reduced Information Overload: Personalized search results also filter out irrelevant items to reduce information overload, making decision-making easier and more enjoyable.

Increased Engagement: Users are more likely to engage with content or products that resonate with their interests, leading to longer session durations and a greater likelihood of conversions.

Conclusion

Integrating Amazon Personalize and Amazon OpenSearch Service transforms user experiences, drives user engagement, and unlocks new growth opportunities for your platform or application. By embracing this innovative combination and encouraging its adoption, you can lead the way in delivering exceptional personalized search experiences in the digital age.

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Highlighting Serverless Smarts at re:Invent 2023

Dec 19, 2023
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8 MIN READ

Quiz-Takers Return Again and Again to Prove Their Serverless Knowledge

This past November, the Cloudtech team attended AWS re:Invent, the premier AWS customer event held in Las Vegas every year. Along with meeting customers and connecting with AWS teams, Cloudtech also sponsored the event with a booth at the re:Invent expo. 

With a goal of engaging our re:Invent booth visitors and educating them on our mission to solve data problems with serverless technologies, we created our Serverless Smarts quiz. The quiz, powered by AWS, asked users to answer five questions about AWS serverless technologies, and scored quiz-takers based on accuracy and speed at which they answered the questions. Paired with a claw machine to award quiz-takers with a chance to win prizes, we saw increased interest in our booth from technical attendees ranging from CTOs to DevOps engineers.

But how did we do it? Read more below to see how we developed the quiz, the data we gathered, and key takeaways we’ll build on for re:Invent next year.

What We Built

Designed by our Principal Cloud Solutions Architect, the Serverless Smarts quiz was populated with 250 questions with four possible answers each, ranging in difficulty to assess the quiz-taker’s knowledge of AWS serverless technologies and related solutions. When a user would take the quiz, they would be presented with five questions from the database randomly, given 30 seconds to answer each, and the speed and accuracy of their answers would determine their overall score. This quiz was built in a way that could be adjusted in real-time, meaning we could react to customer feedback and outcomes if the quiz was too difficult or we weren’t seeing enough variance on the leaderboard. Our goal was to continually make improvements to give the quiz-taker the best experience possible.

The quiz application's architecture leveraged serverless technologies for efficiency and scalability. The backend consisted of AWS Lambda functions, orchestrated behind an API Gateway and further secured by CloudFront. The frontend utilized static web pages hosted on S3, also behind CloudFront. DynamoDB served as the serverless database, enabling real-time updates to the leaderboard through WebSocket APIs triggered by DynamoDB streams. The deployment was streamlined using the SAM template.

Please see the Quiz Architecture below: 

What We Saw in the Data

As soon as re:Invent wrapped, we dived right into the data to extract insights. Our findings are summarized below: 

  • Quiz and Quiz Again: The quiz was popular with repeat quiz-takers! With a total number of 1,298 unique quiz-takers and 3,627 quizzes completed, we saw an average of 2.75 quiz completions per user. Quiz-takers were intent on beating their score and showing up on the leaderboard, and we often had people at our booth taking the quiz multiple times in one day to try to out-do their past scores. It was so fun to cheer them on throughout the week. 
  • Everyone's a Winner: Serverless experts battled it out on the leaderboard. After just one day, our leaderboard was full of scores over 1,000, with the highest score at the end of the week being 1,050. We saw an average quiz score of 610, higher than the required 600 score to receive our Serverless Smarts credential badge. And even though we had a handful of quiz-takers score 0, everyone who took the quiz got to play our claw machine, so it was a win all around! 
  • Speed Matters: We saw quiz-takers soar above the pressure of answering our quiz questions quickly, knowing answers were scored on speed as well as accuracy. The average amount of time it took to complete the quiz was 1-2 minutes. We saw this time speed up as quiz-takers were working hard and fast to make it to the leaderboard, too. 
  • AWS Proved their Serverless Chops: As leaders in serverless computing and data management, AWS team members showed up in a big way. We had 118 people from AWS take our quiz, with an average score of 636 - 26 points above the average - truly showcasing their knowledge and expertise for their customers. 
  • We Made A Lot of New Friends: We had quiz-takers representing 794 businesses and organizations - a truly wide-ranging activity connecting with so many re:Invent attendees. Deloitte and IBM showed the most participation outside of AWS - I sure hope you all went back home and compared scores to showcase who reigns serverless supreme in your organizations! 

Please see our Serverless Smarts Leaderboard below

What We Learned 

Over the course of re:Invent, and our four days at our booth in the expo hall, our team gathered a variety of learnings. We proved (to ourselves) that we can create engaging and fun applications to give customers an experience they want to take with them. 

We also learned that challenging our technology team to work together and injecting some fun and creativity into their building process combined with the power of AWS serverless products can deliver results for our customers.  

Finally, we learned the value of thinking outside the box to deliver for customers is the key to long term success.

Conclusion

re:Invent 2023 was a success, not only in connecting directly with AWS customers, but also in learning how others in the industry are leveraging serverless technologies. All of this information helps Cloudtech solidify its approach as an exclusive AWS Partner and serverless implementation provider. 

If you want to hear more about how Cloudtech helps businesses solve data problems with AWS serverless technologies, please connect with us - we would love to talk with you!

And we can’t wait until re:Invent 2024. See you there!

Get started on your cloud modernization journey today!

Let Cloudtech build a modern AWS infrastructure that’s right for your business.