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. ...

A look back at FOSS4GUK 2018 Dan @ormsbydaniel1 The whole event was great and I'm really glad I managed to go.  One person I was chatting to during one of the coffee breaks told me they were just so struck by what a friendly event it was compared to conferences they had attended - and I couldn't agree more! For me though, that manifested itself in the open and transparent way that the speakers and delegates shared their knowledge and expertise, with a real willingness to help others.  It really brings it home that the thing that is as amazing as the technology aspect of FOSS, is the real community of people who are working on it and with it. In terms of talks and workshops (aside from all the fantastic Astun-led sessions 😊 which were great), other highlights for me were the sessions by Ross McDonald ( @mixedbredie ) and Tom Armitage ( @MapNav_Tom ), both of whom did great workshops and presentations around routing and cartographic visualisation; I used...