Gentrack hosts Auckland AWS Community Meetup

On Thursday 5^th of August, Gentrack’s R&D team had the pleasure of hosting the August Auckland Amazon Web Services Community meetup at our New Zealand office. The Auckland AWS Community is a group dedicated to meeting monthly and sharing insights and skills related to the technical services provided by AWS, and serves as an invaluable networking and learning and development opportunity for AWS users of all levels. This month’s meeting featured two presentations from community members, who shared their experiences and knowledge of AWS services.

To welcome the community and introduce them to Gentrack, our Principal Software Engineer Chris Bertram kicked off the evening by sharing our mission, and how our products and developers use AWS serverless technologies to create innovative cleantech solutions that are transforming the energy sector.

The first presentation of the evening, delivered by AWS Consultant at Datacom Dinesh Shawma, covered how to use Pulumi, an Infrastructure as Code solution for the provisioning of cloud resources that can be written using programming languages like Node.js and Python, rather than proprietary domain specific languages. Using programming languages allows developers to work more efficiently and have more control. As an extra, Dinesh also discussed the cost benefits of consolidating the number of NAT Gateways deployed by using a shared networking account instead running individual NAT gateways in multiple VPCs.

The second presentation, delivered by Nathan Jones, Principal Engineer at Centrapay, provided a useful introduction to DynamoDB indexing best practices. Nathan covered how to use indexes to efficiently query tables with heterogeneous data types and follow AWS best practice of single table design to hold records with different data and schemas.  It included useful patterns on how to use DynamoDB as a realtime, highly scalable, durable, and performant database.

Before and after the two sessions, attendees took the chance to network and further share their expertise, as well to enjoy the Auckland office-space and make use of the pool table, table tennis, and have a drink and some pizza on the outdoor deck area.

The night was a great success, and Gentrack look forward to being further involved in the Auckland AWS community in the future.

You can view photos and videos of the night below, and thank you to the Gentrack volunteers that helped to put on the evening.

Read more about how Gentrack is leveraging AWS to provide integrated, cloud-native offerings to transform the utilities industry on our blog here.