AWS Gameday

What to expect from such an event

Posted by Lucian Patian, Cristian Pirtea on October 10, 2022 in Dev tagged with Cloud, AWS

A few weeks ago our company hosted an AWS Gameday event throughout our sites. There aren’t too many details online about it so I decided to give you a short heads-up.

If you get the chance to take part in it, don’t miss out. It’s really fun and in the end everyone agreed they learned something new.

The teams will be created based on the individual AWS experience of the participants, trying to keep a balance and a sense of competitiveness. In our case, each team had 3 members passing from juniors to experienced users.

Half an hour before the start you get all the details about the actual game, the entire “show” will be about 4-5 hours with no actual breaks. You can take a snack or a coffee break at any time but this will impact your teams ranking 😄

During the activity there will be a live ranking system displayed on a local TV/large monitor where you can see how your team is performing. This might give you a sense of being on the Wall Street…

You’ll get access to AWS accounts with deployed infrastructure so prepairing with templates/scripts won’t help, it will just consume your time and you won’t have much, those 5 hours fly really fast.

There are two ways to win points during the game. One is to configure and tweak your resources to be available as much as possible for other teams to use. The other is to consume data from other teams and this adds an extra spice to the entire gamble.

Every now and then, some changes will be done to your existing infrastructure which will cause a bit of chaos. This is a great moment to be on your toes and climb the rakings.

Try to delegate separate tasks to each member because details matter… 👀

I’m not going to mention the services used because it would be a major spoiler but don’t worry, they are really common ones, so you’ll be just fine.

I wish you all the fun a geek can have and enjoy it!