London’s calling for salesforce is a classic community conference with all the things that you don’t normally get in a vendor or marketing conference.

Initial impressions as someone attending it for their first time was that the conference was run by a long-time group of friends, ¹ and gave off that warm community feel but still run professionally, and given that Salesforce is a still growing trend it was well catered for with all the freebies, everything from massages to good giveaways.

The content was far more what I like to see at a conference, with tons of deep dive content for the product and how to use and expand it. As you can see from the screenshot, there was loads of concurrent sessions going on and the vendor area was well placed because you go via it between sessions to grab a coffee.

The Vendor area its self was nicely laid out, and fit in well with the conference timetable giving you time when you needed it to have a good chunk of time to talk to a specific vendor.

Good T-shirt Swag, solid make good art and slightly unusual (front)

You could not get your t-shirt till at least lunchtime. So you can’t run off early which is always a known problem when hosting an event inside a major metropolis that is full of interesting stuff.

The session content its self was slightly different to the other community conferences I go to, which are very very geeky with live coding, meaning you had to research before you even went to the session. This was far more accepting to people who didn’t know much about Salesforce or its community. I think the phrase to sum it up would be “No Click Code”, which seems to be a buzzword used by a number of the vendors.

Personally, I do wish there was one channel available that you went to and did some really, really geeky stuff that was written by the pure devs, but I’m aware that that’s because that’s what I am. Everything else seemed to be catered for perfectly with good food and even an after conference party.

Something that should be noted is they’ve managed to achieve near perfect diversity on genders in both attendees and presenters, far better than any of the big conferences or even previous communities ones, however they’ve done it, other conferences should be copying it.

Conclusion

Frankly I have not been shutting up about this conference to my colleagues that do salesforce, and will sure as hell be going next year as well as dragging multiple people with me, it is very much recommended.

1. just like the IBM ones I used to attend,[↩]

So I’m back for another AWS Summit. As always with Amazon, the actual organisation was slick and well put together, you received a phone call beforehand, asking what you were hoping to get out of the conference, the joining instructions and the app for managing what you got out of the summit was also really good. They seem to have scaled everything to an nicety.

After picking up the pass and doing a good hard zip through the vendor showcase while they set up (making a list of people I wanted to see and chat too) it was in to the hall for the main presentation.

As expected, it was very, very AI orientated.

The main presentation on AI was exceptionally good, in that it broke things up into reasonable chunks and also was not only technical enough for the geeks, but presented things for the senior managers in a way that would be understandable. So, not only did they present their own AI as Amazon Titan, but it also brought into the common language the concept that there are multiple different types of AI cores that you could use, and how using them with bedrock, you could pick the one that is most suitable for your needs.

All of this was summarised really tightly and really made AI config into a wizard. ¹

There was also a perfect nod to Amazon code whisperer which is a rather adorable plug-in, and is a truly practical use for AI with genuine productivity

Thankfully, it wasn’t all AI. They did demo a bunch of the core stuff that makes AWS so good, and laid out the different levels of servers vs containers vs serverless. showing that you can move between them at any point, etc etc, which always needs to be hammered home I feel in the modern app world.

The Lower Floor showcase floor before it got busy

However the conference was not perfect.

The showcase floor was scaled the same as other showcase floors. yet somehow felt constantly busy. I think there was enough room for the crowds to pass through, or for people to have conversations with the vendors, but not both at the same time. Now normally this is not a problem, because in such events you do most of your conversations when all of the sessions are on and the showcase floor goes quiet, but that break did not seem to happen, and that’s not to say there weren’t a load of sessions. They were dozens scattered all over the place. But they were on the short side, and there was no solid path or trail to follow. If you looked on both the app, and on the PDF, it was just a list of codes and the only colour coding or pathing was for the map its self. This seemed to dissuade people from going to the sessions. I never saw any large scale movement to get to the next session as you would in any other conference. People didn’t seem to know that the sessions were on. Which meant that I missed a number of sessions I would have rather liked attending, but quite frankly to have got them I would have had to sit down grimly with a pen and paper and some highlight markers myself and worked it out. So perhaps that needs to be improved for next year.

For the vendors them selves, They did seem to have a hard time differentiating themselves. There’s a lot of them there. and because you’re moving through quickly because of the constant pressure. It made it hard to just stop and have a look at ones that caught your eye (I really wanted to spend some time with CockroachDB but its was like fighting up stream).

The only other criticism for me was of the food. I’m one of the picky eaters on planet Earth, and myself and a colleague² stood in front of a long queue. Then we were faced with a bunch of identical bowls. And had to work through a list of ingredients to try and find which ones could be eaten, at which point we gave up and went to the pub.

Conclusion

So was it worth it? Would I go again? yes to both, but only just….

AWS? Yes.

The technical side? Yes.

The chance to see which vendors are core to AWS and to talk to them? Yes.

The organisation of the conference and the facilities of the conference? No

1. Dear Lord setting up an AI with a wizard, never thought I’d see it[↩]
2. who was one of the non picky eaters[↩]

For a lot of the major companies, the quick wins of moving to the cloud, which really translates to making it easy to vertically scale some existing servers is over.

We are now getting into the area of integrating serious existing systems with cloud services and having to match the expectations of cloud services to everything else that exists in the company.

One of the big things I’ve seen now multiple times is that we are trying to match the “everything is instant” “everything is real-time” expectations of consumer level products that are built totally in the cloud with existing on premise infrastructure and platforms. “What is the problem?” I hear you cry, just upgrade everything, but it doesn’t quite work like that. Now you have a cloud system that has an expectation of receiving data from internal systems, and indeed can pull data from said systems at real time, but the source systems just can’t take that load, everything from database servers, to internal network, to app servers are not designed for such a load. Not only are they not designed for this stress in general terms, but they have not had to work out the capacitance planning for it. A perfect example of this is transactional logging. When you enable transactional logging on source systems so that they can feed these monster cloud systems, that introduces an additional load across the board and these have not been planned for, not only are these not being catered to at an IT level , but they are often ultimately driven from other business areas and the normal slow business growth planning of humans.

The points to be learned from such problems are:

1. Communication, communication, communication: With all of your existing people. You will find you will have communication issues, but this is not down to them not wanting to grow or change. This is simply down to the speed that the internal systems is set to grow is not aligning with the cloud systems expectation. You have to work with people from all areas. You have to get them involved from the minute you’re starting to do this. Try and give them a heads up on what you’re going to do. They often have to plan their budget and how much they spend on infrastructure change and people hiring a year in advance, suddenly turning on your AWS servers and cranking them up to 11 does not help them.
2. Expectations: Most of your customers for your systems are now expecting consumer level speeds. All of your social media plans are nearly real time. Now, all of a sudden you are expecting that from human and IT Systems that are buried deep under a whole raft of procedures that you have not changed for decades. You cannot provide real time updates to such things with only changes to IT systems, you need to bring along the business systems that are supporting them. Explain this to your cloud system consumers so they can set their expectations along real human lines.
3. Fear: A little bit dramatic, but its a real statement, people fear change, if you do not work with people on this they will fear these changes. To gain proper improvements from cloud systems you have to work with everybody, introduce them to the advantages and their place in such a changed world, help them grow as you are helping the IT systems grow.

The best analogy I can think of to explain all this is from the image that is headlining this post, from “Appleseed” a famous comic by Masamune Shirow which confronts a lot of the issues of change in the world. One of the doctors in the comic states “You can’t give someone a Cyborg Leg Just like THAT, It’d tear out when they try to run”. Think of your move to cloud in thoese terms.