On Monday 27th February, members of the Firemind team made their way to London Gatwick, for a trip to our Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners at the Dublin office in Ireland.

Alongside AWS, we were there to guide Irish Startups through effective data management, cloud services and building data lakes that centralise and store all data.

The team were excited to deliver a partner collaborated workshop of this type with our peers at AWS. Last year we had the pleasure of teaming up for the Machine Learning GameDay at AWS HQ in London, and we were keen to take things to the next level in this data enabling event.

We had many unique businesses attend, each of which had services and solutions that cater to a wide array of audiences. But, all of whom need strong data management practices and data retrieval options.

The first part of the workshop covered a selection of useful AWS services. Including; what they do, how they operate and why they can provide a clearer path for success in the cloud. Attendees were shown an example data ecosystem, and were then guided through the four biggest advantages of building a data lake:

• Creating a centralised repository for both structured and unstructured data​
• Storing data ‘as-is’, in open-source file formats, to enable direct analytics​
• Enabling advanced analytics across all data sources​
• Decoupling storage from compute, allowing your business data needs the ability to scale

Once the attendees had a strong understanding of what data lakes are and how they’re built in the AWS cloud, we then covered the direct business benefits. From creating Central Data Catalogs using AWS Glue, to querying data instantly using Amazon Athena.

Once the theory and benefits were addressed, the interactive workshops began. Our specialist team, alongside AWS, worked with the attendees to build a serverless data pipeline based on their own data. Starting from a sample of their data (saved in Amazon S3), the groups went through an intensive workshop that focused on transforming, analysing and visualising their data.

By the end, they would have a Proof of Concept (PoC), with which they could continue to evolve into a more complex data pipeline, deriving further data insights.

Watch our highlight video of the event below, showcasing a number of the guests as well as the AWS team on hand to support and guide throughout the workshop sessions.

If you’re a business that’s looking to further harness the power of your data, and would like specialist care in creating your own data lake, reach out to our team.

As data specialists, we’ll help you consolidate and clean your datasets, build data lakes that make data management a breeze, as well as bring you the value of visualised data. Visualisations and dashboards that help you make strategic decisions for your business.