.re:Wind 2024

Intro

Our 2nd annual re:Wind recently took place. With that, we aim to create an opportunity for companies and institutions to be inspired on their AWS cloud journey by sharing 5 different stories and 5 ways we worked together to achieve our customers' business goals. ✨

People love the unique mix of industry insights and actual use cases. What makes our agenda special is that we present with our customers & partners on stage. They provide the business challenges while we demonstrate how we overcame those. ✅

With that, we experienced significant interest in the event. We not only received almost double the number of registrations (130 in total), but many new and exciting individuals from outside our community also joined in. This blog aims to recap what actually went down.

Let's dive into the first session!

.The State of Tech going into 2024

Our CEO, Marc Schröter, kicked off the event with a warm welcome and handed over to Yasser Hajbi , our Cloud Project Manager who started with the year 2023 in review. Here is a short summary of what was covered:

.AI Advancements

🔥 The AI advancements took executives' interest worldwide by storm and made companies feel pressured to react. Multimodality, Constitutional AI and Text-to-video are just a few mentions.

.Data is the new gold

🔥 Industries, such as retail, manufacturing or finance, all experienced a huge growth in data utilisation for strategic decision-making.

.Cloud is always on the rise

🔥 According to Gartner, all segments of the cloud market are expected to grow in 2023, with cloud infrastructure and platform services driving the highest growth in spending. Gartner even predicts that 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on the cloud as their fundamental underlying platform.

.Evolving Role of Engineers

🔥 The Engage Group 2023 Employability Report states how AI joins the workforce, building up a controversial stance about AI fueling a reskilling boom. Entry-level roles have mixed feelings about how prepared they are for the workforce, while skill-based hiring is gaining traction. There are growing numbers of companies prioritising practical skills experience as opposed to university degrees

.Industry Layoffs

🔥 According to finbold, more than 160.000 layoffs in the first quarter of 2023 alone were recorded in the global tech industry. Reasons for that, are just as widely-spread as it gets. We mentioned the ongoing economic downturn, the effects of the pandemic, and its overhiring phase in the tech industry, leading to companies now focusing their operations more on reducing costs and, therefore, increasing profitability.

.IoT Advancements

🔥 According to the IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 157 zettabytes of data will be generated in 2024 in an ongoing trend of Edge Computing meeting AI & 5G. The ongoing rollout of 5G networks will make Edge computing viable for many new applications.

.Platform Engineering

🔥 By 2026, 80% of large software engineering organisations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusabe services, components and tools for application delivery, according to Gartner.

.Into globaldatanet

We also took some time to reflect on our achievements and memorable moments. From having a booth at the AWS Summit for the first time, a legendary team off with an interactive team workshop about building AI solutions, moving into a bigger office, being part of the EMEA Manufacturing & Industrial Symposium, becoming Public Sector Partner and many great new projects. We can only be excited about what’s to come in 2024. 💜

.AWS re:Invent 2023 recap

Rainer Möller joined us again, along with Stefan Krüger on stage. The two AWS Partner Solution Architects shared all the highlights from the recent re:Invent 2023, including news about all relevant services, such as the introduction of Amazon Q, AWS’s generative AI assistant that promises to boost company's workforce productivity. 🚀

It would extend the length of this blog to share everything covered by Rainer & Stefan, but thankfully, they shared their presentation with us so we can share it with you. If you are interested in a compiled list of all relevant news, click here.

After a break filled with people engaging in open discussions and enjoying the Franzbrötchen & drinks, the highlight of the agenda began. 🎬

.​​AWS Cloud Use-Cases

"Data platform for Germany's electric charging infrastructure"

Philip Zeh, our AWS Solution Architect, & Laura Weissbach, Data Analyst from the Nationale Leitstelle Ladeinfrastruktur at NOW GmbH shared the stage and showcased how modern cloud technologies are essential in digitizing public institutions' processes. ✨

The German government aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 65% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. A key step is the Deutschlandnetz initiative, with 8,000 charging points across 1,000+ locations, ensuring fast charging for medium and long-distance travel. ⚡

Regional network providers, responsible for building the stations, must regularly provide operational data to the Leitstelle for effective monitoring and analysis of station capacities and activities. The operational data varies in terms of frequency (minute-by-minute, daily, monthly, and event-based) and format, covering status updates, charging processes, electric meter readings, and interactions, including capacity, costs, efficiency, customer satisfaction rates, complaints, etc. 🛠️

We developed a centralized, highly scalable, and secure data platform, based on an OCPI-(international standard protocol for connecting Charge Point Operators with service providers) related API that ingest, validates, and stores the data coming from thousands of charging points and offers the possibility to analyze all relevant information at scale. ✅

Our solution is built with a fully serverless and event-driven architecture, meaning the Leitstelle at NOW GmbH is able to cut their operational costs to only the resource usage actually being invoked. 🚀

"AI powered target identification for Private Equity"

Finding hidden gems in the software industry and turning them into European market leaders is BID Equity's specialty. 🔍💎

They seek out interesting, attractive, independently developed companies to acquire and improve. A unique challenge is that these companies are not actively sold; instead, they must be approached for acquisition but lack significant public data. Manually identifying suitable M&A targets is an extremely time-consuming task that required a scalable solution.

This is where Dr. Helge Hofmeister, Managing Director at BID Equity Group, and Jovan Cusic, our AWS Cloud Developer, step in and highlight an AI-driven solution that crawls through the web, classifies potential software companies reliably, and estimates company size accurately through image analysis. It also analyzes the company's industry sectors and technology stack using Natural Language Processing (NLP). 📈🌐

Jovan presented how Machine Learning development, including building, training, and deploying models, can be made scalable through the use of SageMaker Studio. Its ML Development environments allow for deploying multiple models within a single endpoint, optimizing resource usage and therefore cutting costs with an auto-scaling feature that will boost your ML model hosting. ✅

This use case is easily applicable to any other business that would like to integrate AI into its operation on AWS to increase productivity. ✨

"Building the IoT & Data Platform for one of the largest container fleets of the world."

Žarko Bogićević, our AWS Cloud Engineer & Dr. Martin Lipphardt, Director IT Equipment & Intermodal Operations at Hapag-Lloyd AG gave insights into this pioneering cloud use case that helps Hapag-Lloyd AG in operating the smartest container fleet in the world. 💯

Hapag-Lloyd AG is moving over 250 ships, transporting containers that hold 11 million TEU transport volume across the world. These containers provide valuable information via IoT tracking devices, such as location, timing, temperature and health conditions, generated by different solution providers. 🚢

This results in huge amounts of data that multiple technical teams, from Big Data to Smart Container, need to collect and harmonize before it turns into valuable insights. We solved that problem by developing a high-performance cloud-platform that ingests these massive amounts of data seamlessly in a cost-effective way by scaling quickly based on incoming and outgoing data. The data is processed, sent to various data streams, and converted into valuable insights in near-real time. ✅

This collaboration allows Hapag Lloyd to now gain insights from the IoT tracking that enables decision-making at an unprecedented scale, as Hapag Lloyd is operating worldwide on sea and in the hinterland, with now additional insights on container destinations inland.

"Automated ML Pipelines for Waste Management"

Mohammad Moallemi, our AWS Cloud Engineer & Tobias Richard, ML Engineer/Data Scientist, explained why building a strong foundation can reduce operational costs and be a door-opener for future ML use cases. This one might be relevant for every company integrating ML into their operations on AWS! ♻️

c-trace GmbH is a key player in the waste management logistics industry known for setting the standard with its innovative IT & logistics solutions. As their Machine Learning operations expanded, the challenge of configuring model training manually and maintaining training infrastructure was time consuming and hindering the team to focus on more relevant tasks that drive greater business value. ❌

We built the foundation of their Serverless MLOps platform, offering self-service training pipelines with all the necessary requirements baked into it. From using versioned datasets to automated model versioning! All in all leading to more effective resource allocation and a new cloud-native landscape, that makes introducing new use cases and ideas easier. ✅

"Creating a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) in a regulated industry"

David Krohn, our AWS Solution Architect, Mirko Schulz CCoE Team Lead, Marcell Jobs AWS Solution Architect at BARMER will shared exclusive insights and valuable information on how to navigate the regulatory industry and why working with public sector institutions means aligning people with business. 🙏🏻

BARMER, one of the largest health insurance companies in Germany, develops innovative care offerings and provides rapid access to innovations in medicine, prevention, rehabilitation, and care. 💊

Since 2020, we have been working closely with their IT team to provide a secure cloud platform for service development and operations. What makes this cloud use-case even more special is the health industry's strictly regulated guidelines, all of which needed consideration, including endpoint monitoring, while maintaining project agility.

We established a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on security best practices and compliance with standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Our highly appreciated, free-to-use solution, AWS Firewall Factory, monitors all application endpoints and constructs scalable firewalls. These firewalls protect against common vulnerabilities and potential security issues, all manageable through its dashboards. ✅

As one of the 3 AWS Security Competency Partners in the DACH region, we were happy to share our experiences in developing a cloud center of excellence to inspire the public sector on AWS! 🔥

Conclusion

And with that, our 2nd re:Wind came to an end, after our guests used the last remaining hour to connect with each other and discuss the shared topics. 🙌🏻

We received lots of positive feedback, honest thoughts, and impressions from our guests that we all took in to evaluate and gather our learnings for the next time. While we don’t want to reveal too much just yet, we can definitely promise to focus even more on the problem-solving use cases, add dedicated Q&As after each session, and increase opportunities for networking. 🚀

With that being said, we can only encourage you to join one of our many other upcoming opportunities to connect with us this year & check out the recordings of the event here. 💜