IDA IT x AWS User Group: AWS AI for webtracking at Extrabladet and best practices for AWS cost optimation from Oblivion

For this session of the AWS User Group Copenhagen, we will be looking to two super interesting topics: First how Ekstra Bladet has built an ML/AI solution on AWS to avoid having to use the traditional web tracking tools. Second we’ll hear from Oblivion Cloud Control on best-practices for AWS Cost Optimization – learning about the best AWS programs to use and what processes should be implemented.

• 17.00 – 17.15     Arrivals and hellos and intro
• 17.15 – 18.00     Ekstra Bladet: Running web-tracking on AWS for ~120 million daily events
• 18.00 – 18.45     Sandwiches and drinks - networking
• 18.30 – 19.00     Oblivion: Best practices for AWS Cost Optimizations
• 19.00 – 19.30     Round off, more questions and ideas for topics at next event

Ekstra Bladet is one of, if not the, largest online news sites in Denmark.

Since 2020, we've been running our own purpose-built realtime event streaming system instead of using the traditional web tracking tools.

Since building it, we've just over doubled the load on the system with very little scaling efforts. Today, we handle ~120 million daily events (peak ~170M) in near realtime (<5 seconds delay), serving both BI, Machine Learning and operational needs.

Alexander will go over some of the reasons why we built it, as well as how we did it, and explain more about the core AWS Services involved - the pros and cons, and lessons learned along the way. In particular focus will be on how we use Kinesis (Data streams and Firehose), Lambda, RDS Aurora, SQS and ECS (Fargate) as the main services, and CDK as the provisioning tool of choice.

Oblivion loves the cloud, but knows it’s not easy to make things simple.

Oblivion is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner since 2018 and was brought up on good old Dutch pragmatism. Our first AWS invoice is from back in September 2006! We soon figured that the only way to integrate cloud solutions at the heart of a business is by taking into account every aspect from safety and cost to security and scalability, whilst constantly being able to adapt effectively to the latest innovations. We help our customers set and realize these ambitious goals in the cloud, by dreaming big but implementing with Dutch pragmatism and (sometimes brutal) realism. In total Oblivion are more than 60 people of which 5 are based in Denmark.

Speaking is Mudit Gupta who’s one of the leading experts in the field of AWS Cost Optimization having helped countless AWS customers large and small over the years saving on their AWS spend.