AWS General Immersion Day for a Wellington Customer
Posted by Chris McKinnel - 15 March 20215 minute read
A couple of weeks ago I ran a large AWS Immersion Day for internal CCL staff on Control Tower. The session was a success but there were a few rough edges that needed to be smoothed out before running a similar session for a customer.
One of the main problems we had last time was the labs included the running of scripts that were written for a Linux operating system, but most of the attendees were running Windows with various bash emulators. I saw Cygwin, Bash for Git, Windows Subsystem for Linux and Cloud9 - so a lot of attendees got different behaviour when they run the scripts on their local environment.
With that in mind, last week I ran our first "General" AWS Immersion Day for a customer in Wellington, which covered the basics of AWS. It was a 101 session intended to teach attendees about basic AWS services, but also about AWS terminology and concepts so when they go to do self-learning they are not totally overwhelmed by jargon.
The session was a mixture of presentations and hands-on labs, and I tried to lean towards the lab side because it's always difficult to sit in a room and listen to someone stand at the front of the room and drone on for a whole day!
CCL / AWS Immersion Day Attendees in Wellington.
What went well?
Targeted content
I made sure to talk with the technical people at the customer and have them
show me what they had in AWS before I decided what it is I would cover in
the session content. This meant that I could target the content so what
we were talking about was really relevant.
That had a couple of side-effects:
- it was great for the attendees because the content was relevant, so they were less likely to fall asleep, and
- it was great for us because it got conversation going about the customer and uncovered areas where we could help them
Updated Lab content
I took the time to go through each of the labs myself and update all of
the screen shots so they matched the new GUI, and make sure they were
easy to follow.
There were still a few stumbling blocks in the lab content, but much less than if I just used the lab content from the Immersion Day portal.
I sent these updated labs back to the Immersion Day team, so hopefully this will end up back in the portal for others to benefit from as well.
In-person delivery
Having only delivered a single Immersion Day, and having it split half between
in-person and half virtual, I was pretty keen to run this one in person. It's so
much easier to engage with your attendees if you're in person, and often
attendees will put themselves on mute and stay on mute for the whole day if
the session is virtual.
I felt like doing this one in person was way better than if we had to do it virtually - I even postponed the session a week so we could do it without me having to break company policy travel rules.
What could have been improved?
Covid life
Because AWS is a global organisation, the New Zealand offices need to adhere
to some global standards which have been put in place to help combat Covid-19.
When we were in the AWS building and not in the training room we had to wear a face covering, which was a bit of a pain. Not the end of the world, obviously, but still not ideal being at Level 1 and still needing to wear a mask.
Ambitious lab content
I am apparently a slow learner because I made this mistake in my first
Immersion Day, but I was a bit ambitous with the lab content again. I really
wanted to avoid people finishing the labs super quickly and just sitting around
waiting for the next one, but I think I've realised that this isn't a big
deal because the people that get through the labs quickly probably have a
heap of work on themselves, and will keep themselves busy while they wait
for others to catch up.
Out-dated slide decks
The slide decks I used were direct from the AWS Immersion Day portal, and
unfortunately I realised too late that they were from 2019 so they were a
little dated. I rattled a few cages in at AWS, but didn't manage to shake
out the latest versions in time for the session.
Topics covered for this Immersion Day
For this Immersion Day we covered:
- Introduction to AWS and EC2 Overview + Lab
- Networking in AWS + Lab
- AWS Security Overview + IAM Lab
- AWS Systems Manager Inventory and Patch Management + Lab
Feedback
After the session, I asked the attendees to provide some feedback so we can keep improving the quality of the Immersion Days, and it was pretty positive.
Good coverage of some key concepts. Will encourage the team to learn more.
Answered my questions that weren't on the agenda.
Two years ago I attended an AWS Immersion day. This session was superior.
- Overall: 4.75/5
- Presenter: 5/5
- Presentation Content: 4.75/5
- Session Duration: 4.5/5
- Hands on Labs: 4.75/5
- Breaks: 4.75/5
- Food: 5/5
- Room: 5/5
- Facilities: 4.75/5
We have another few of these sessions planned for customers already, so it's extremely useful to get this feedback.