The Scale Factory
scalefactory.com
The Scale Factory
@scalefactory.com
Award-winning consultancy, empowering SaaS teams to deliver more on AWS. We're an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. Part of Ten10.
And we're done - Dave wraps up by wishing everyone a great Summit, as do I!

If you want to find me, I'll be in the Community Lounge on the User Group booth from 3 until 5 today.

After that, I'll be over at the Fremantle hosting our afterparty. Join us! info.scalefactory.com/aws-afterpar...
AWS Summit After Party - Register your place
Sign up and join us for an evening filled with free-flowing drinks, snacks, games and an opportunity to network with 200 peers from across the UK Cloud Leaders ecosystem; it's set to be the ideal post...
info.scalefactory.com
April 30, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Whilst this conversation goes on, there's an exodus from the audience, because it's now 11am, which means the keynote is running over, and they're keen to get to their next sessions.
April 30, 2025 at 10:02 AM
Up now, another financial services customer: Daniel Maguire from LSEG, to talk positively about Outposts. In FX trading, speed and latency is important. Outposts lets them move AWS grade compute into their exchanges, closer to the data.
April 30, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Dave's back now, to shill Amazon Q which is a product name AWS now use to talk about a bunch of things that used to not be called that. The main thing he's talking about today is Q's ability to help with migration work. I'll believe that when I see it.
April 30, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Nat West have also implemented Amazon Connect, migrating 9,000 call centre agents who support 19 million customers - which makes 19,009,000 people who aren't looking forward to the day they decide to replace most of that with AI agents.
April 30, 2025 at 9:55 AM
95% of Nat West customers bank online, with 10M+ customers using their mobile app, backed by a cloud native, microservices based solution across AWS multiple regions.
April 30, 2025 at 9:51 AM
As predicted, a customer from the finance sector takes the stage. Scott Marcar from Nat West takes to the stage.
April 30, 2025 at 9:48 AM
As well as model choice and trust/safety guardrails, Bedrock offers a fully managed RAG service, and a number of features for prompt optimisation, prompt caching, and cost optimisation. If you're building on AWS, and you're working on AI features, you should be trying those out with Bedrock.
April 30, 2025 at 9:45 AM
I presented at a conf in March, and covered Bedrock. Some (AWS-using) CTOs afterwards told me that they didn't know about most of its features. I think the market just tuned out AWS' breathless banging on about GenAI in the days when they didn't have anything of note to offer in that space.
April 30, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Anyway, time for another Bedrock sales pitch. Honestly, I've given AWS a lot of shit about their GenAI marketing, but Bedrock is shaping up to be a pretty capable service, with a large choice of models (including Amazon's own, inexpensive, Nova models), and smart security features.
April 30, 2025 at 9:39 AM
Bold to bring someone from the creative industry out to advocate for GenAI, because most of the creatives in my Bluesky feed are pretty cross about most of it.
April 30, 2025 at 9:36 AM
Untold Studios, I should say. They run 1,475 render nodes, and 244 workstations on EC2, cool. "I'd like to conclude by talking about GenAI", Palmer says, deeply aware of the exploding collar that AWS Marketing will push the button on if she doesn't.
April 30, 2025 at 9:35 AM
Invited to the stage now, AWS customer Rochelle Palmer from the world's first cloud based studio, Untold Stories, who look to have been responsible for that horrifying Mountain Dew ad in which singer Seal has his face digitally grafted onto an actual seal. Thanks AWS, I guess.
April 30, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Today, Amazon S3 contains 400,000,000,000,000+ objects. But only because you lot never clean up after yourselves.
April 30, 2025 at 9:23 AM
Over the last two years, over 50% of new CPUs provisoined in AWS data centres are Graviton, their custom CPU, giving price/performance benefits over other processors (the manufacturers of which are sponsoring the event today in spite of this fact).
April 30, 2025 at 9:21 AM
Brown reminds us of the existance of Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks, which allow you to reserve GPU accelerated instances to run your machine learning workloads.
April 30, 2025 at 9:19 AM
He announces that yesterday, AWS launched the second generation of AWS Outposts racks. These new racks have enhanced networking capability for low latency and high throughput, and soon will support GPU instances. aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/an...
April 30, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Dave's giving an overview of the AWS technology stack. Apparently AWS increased the capacity of their (already capacious) backbone network by 80% last year. That's a whole lot of fibre. (Though they probably spell that incorrectly).
April 30, 2025 at 9:15 AM
After thanking the myriad event sponsors, Kay invites Dave Brown, VP of Compute Services to the stage. Dave is also not dressed for a boxing match, or a dance show, so I think my hopes will be dashed today.
April 30, 2025 at 9:13 AM
Kay announces today the, typically clumisly named "Global Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance", promising to give 100,000 UK students the skills they need to *checks notes* get a job at Accenture?
April 30, 2025 at 9:13 AM
We're already onto the AI nonsense. "A new customer adopted AI every singe minute". Sure, Jan.
April 30, 2025 at 9:09 AM
Alison is from London, where she claims Babbage, Lovelace, and Turing started their work. In the latter case, Manchester would like a word.
April 30, 2025 at 9:06 AM
The first fighter takes to the right: Alison Kay, VP UK&I Apparently 20,000 attendees at the event today, way more than my earlier estimate.
April 30, 2025 at 9:05 AM
What if, tho -- and hear me out -- the keynote is now nothing but a dance show? That would be bold.
April 30, 2025 at 9:02 AM