The week of the 4th to 8th of June 2018 was the 11th annual Geonetwork Codesprint in Bolsena, coordinated by GeoCat . As in previous years, the Geonetwork developer team took over an ex-convent , just outside the small town of Bolsena, on the side of the lake of the same name, about 135km north of Rome. View Larger Map At Astun we've always had a firm belief in contributing back something to the open source software that we use, be that by sponsoring or providing enhancements, fixing bugs, or getting involved with conferences and hackathons. Due to the work we've been doing supporting and extending Geonetwork for our local Government INSPIRE metadata portal , for the Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure portal , and with DEFRA, this event seemed like a good opportunity to meet the core developers face to face, to learn something new, and perhaps assist with some development. I went along with no fixed expectations of what would be involved, or what I could contribute....

Last month, a handful of us from 'operations' attended the AWS Summit to keep up to date with what is going on in the Amazon Web Services world.  We've shared our reflections in this Blog and linked through to videos or slides of the sessions where we can. What is the AWS Summit? Amazon run a series of global events in major cities around the world getting to each one every couple of years; 2018 was London's turn. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud hosted computing platform, that Astun use for pretty much everything.  Our own cloud products and services such as iShare in the Cloud, Astun Data Services, Geonetwork / INSPIRE are all hosted there.  Even if what you use from us is exclusively deployed on your own premises, all of software development and most of our internal IT is done in the AWS environment.  It is critical to our business.  If you think that we are putting all our eggs in one basket, it is worth remembering that AWS is a $22 billion p.a. ...