I was at the AWS gameday and it was a very fun and learning experience partnering with fellow colleagues and competitors. AWS has kind of created this concept very differently than a typical hackathon and it is more like a gamified activity in a much more stress-free environment.
For the Migration and Modernization Gameday, it was a 6-hour activity with an hour's break for lunch (most of them had it by their desk). We were asked to migrate a 2-tier e-commerce application to AWS in a specific region with all AWS services at our behest. This specific gameday was a level-300 and required at least an associate certification, but I felt even non-experts with some AWS hands-on knowledge can also contribute immensely to the team.
The first part of the day went into setting up the basic infrastructure on new VPCs and following certain guidelines to migrate databases (using DMS) and web servers (using App Migration service). We followed the AWS documentation for the migration part.
The fun part of the gameday was in the latter half of the session post-lunch when the basic migration was completed and we had to switch the DNS from the on-premise to the cloud infrastructure. That’s when the application is throttled with real-world traffic, volumetric attacks, fault injections, etc. The better your application performed the more points you got and vice versa.
Here are some of the learnings for folks wanting to participate in the next Gameday.
a) Be thorough with the networking concept in AWS. Outline your end-state network architecture view and naming conventions to begin with. As you will be on the console this will help avoid confusion.
b) Plan all the AWS services that would be the right fit for the requirements. Since it's a real-world environment scenario, extra points are awarded to teams that include all different AWS services.
E.g. Cloudfront as CDN, AWS WAF for firewall, AWS Guard Duty for threat detection, AWS Cloudwatch for monitoring, etc.
c)Ensure that the architecture follows the well-architected framework pillars.
Operation Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Sustainability
d) Segregate tasks between team members and ensure to review each other's changes, especially the networking part which is typically confusing.
e) Last but not least, if stuck in any step for long, try to get the application running first and then try implementing the right principles.