Guest blog by one of Tickd’s Tech Wizards, Jake Yeatman.

Who are you?

I’m Jake Yeatman, a Software Engineer working for Tickd for the past 4 months, primarily in charge of backend development. I have been a software engineer for 5 years and I am incredibly excited at what we’re doing at Tickd and the innovations we’re bringing to the energy switching market.

Why is AWS relevant to us at Tickd?

AWS is the backbone of Tickd. The built in scalability provided by AWS allows us to only use the resources we need. This means the system scales up as we grow but also means when there is a huge spike in switching activity, the system automatically handles it.

We also use AWS to reduce the amount of work maintaining, provisioning and the upkeep of physical infrastructure allowing developers to focus on building the best platform we possibly can.

What is the AWS Summit?

The AWS Summit is an annual conference that brings the cloud computing community together. The aim is to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. They offer the opportunity to learn more about the various products and services within AWS and their Technology Partners. There are training seminars, talks and classes which offer insights into best practices and potential alternative methods of working.

Will you implement anything you learnt?

There are 3 key learnings that I will take away from this years summit (in no particular order):

1. How to utilise Amazon CodeCatalyst to help with our management in regards to deploying new services to AWS as it helps consolidate a variety of products we use with AWS in to a singular, clean and intuitive user interface.
2. The concept of ASAP Microservices or (As Serverless As Possible) Microservices, making sure our microservice architecture is using as many Lambda functions as humanly possible whilst making sure to have similar features within the same microservice, for example having anything relating to generating quotes within the same microservice.
3. Whilst at Tickd we make heavy use of logging to ensure our systems are working optimally and to hunt down errors in the switching flow. Datadog’s platform may help break down these logs in to more manageable bitesize groupings, along with managing all the analytical benchmarking. We are going to look in to this product more closely to see whether it is something we will use and implement.

We made a definitive decision to explore Amazon CodeCatalyst and how best we can use it. Our aim is to reduce the amount of time spent on provisioning and validating of our infrastructure within AWS. It should also speed up our development cycles allowing us to focus more on the system rather than spending time in AWS console and configurations.

We are going to make use of the ASAP Microservice concept as it fits with our philosophy of responsive and scalable services.

Bring on next year!