Hace unas semanas me preguntaron en la empresa en la que trabajo (¡gracias Luis!) si podría escribir un texto acerca de la adopción y el uso que hemos hecho de la nube pública de Amazon, AWS, y hoy han publicado en el perfil de LinkedIn el artículo resultante.
Se puede leer en este enlace, Why we like AWS so much (en inglés) o en el PDF.
Why we like AWS so much
Almost three years ago an entire department in EUIGS was born with just one task: jump into the public cloud and learn as much as we could about it. I know, those weren’t the most detailed instructions but it worked, it gave us an idea about what was expected from us and we spent two months learning and training about Amazon Web Services. The begining was tough but we persevered and now we are running several projects in AWS, using all kind of services.
Although we have moved few projects to AWS we are a company with hybrid architecture because we are using both, AWS public cloud and our own premises. As part of Admiral Group, a multinational company, we are working from different countries and all the people in the offices need a secure, fast connection with their projects. Happily for us, it is very easy to connect us to AWS from any place in the world.
We are working from different countries, in a multiaccount environment that allows us to give to every team its own datacenter in the cloud, with resources hardly imaginable in a regular on premise datacenter. Back in the days, when we were begining to work with AWS, teams used to be surprised by all the resources they began their projects with, almost unlimited. Even I myself was suprised the first time I mounted an EFS volume because, by default, it had 8 exabytes available for you and that was just too much.
It may sound too obvious but, one of our concerns related to AWS was security because in EUIGS it is a milestone, not a feature. Like every company in the world, security is not a choice it is part of our daily basis and, even when we build our solutions with security in mind, in AWS we are able to apply our standards inside out, in every part of the process. We are working for an insurance company so the regulations we have to meet are quite strict, as expected, but having some security layers in the infrastructure, the ability to manage security options in every resource and services for monitoring every single bit in our little realms in AWS, our concerns got smaller.
Finally, we had doubts about governance because dealing with thousands of users in different countries might be a nightmare. We though that in AWS we may find the tools and services to, one day, make it possible for all these people to work from wherever they are. We were thinking in six, seven offices and few connections from customers or providers from third countries. COVID-19 showed us that we all, in fact, can work from home.
During the first days of COVID-19 we moved all the people in the company to the cloud. If I asked you to imagine almost two thousand people in four countries working from home, securely, having meetings, talking to clients and coworkers, developing projects, accessing every resource they have like if we never left the office, you may say it is complicated but at least, possible. We did that in two weeks because, luckily, we were performing some tests about something similar and we deployed and applied them.
AWS also has great (and geeky) things and, seriously, who doesn’t like geeky stuff? Lately we are using containers, because everybody loves containers, lambdas, because serverless is easy to deploy (even too easy sometimes) and you can deploy lambdas that are called from an S3 bucket, that calls other lambdas… But our favorite is Data because you create data lakes to store data that has to be analyzed to get answers.
In the end all our doubts about public cloud had been solved (mostly) and our journey in AWS has allowed us to undertake amazing projects and improve others using resources and services we only could dream about years ago. And this is just the begining.
