Top Insights from "Accelerating Business with AWS Solutions" Event

As AWS Partners, at Switch, we have actively participated in events that connected us with AWS professionals who generously shared their expertise, helping companies harness the full potential of AWS services. Our Cloud & DevOps Studio Leader, Héctor Fernández, has been instrumental in building an active AWS community in Uruguay and collaborating with others in the region.

We’ve proudly hosted AWS User Group meetings and participated in key AWS events, which have expanded our technical knowledge and network.

Recently, we co-organized an event with AWS, bringing top experts to Uruguay to showcase innovative AWS solutions and how they drive scalability, cost savings, and faster innovation for companies.

Our speakers

Luis Guirigay, AWS's Worldwide Head of Cloud Infrastructure Solutions, has been pivotal in engaging with AWS User Groups globally and was crucial for making our event successful. With extensive experience managing technical teams and developing strategic technology programs, he is a published author and speaker at over 90 conferences.

Luis not only brought his extensive expertise to our event, but he also successfully recruited the most suitable AWS professionals from various regions to contribute and share their knowledge.

Fabián Labat, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, brought his extensive experience in architecting, managing, and supporting both cloud and on-premise applications, with a strong focus on the financial industry. To our surprise and excitement, Fabián is originally from Uruguay and has lived in New York for the past 24 years.

Last but not least, the energetic Héctor Menones, Senior Solutions Architect, joined us from Argentina to share his passion for designing innovative solutions that drive efficiency and transformation.

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What do companies stand to gain with AWS Solutions?

Our event focused on AWS Solutions, which are designed to help businesses address specific challenges across various industries and technology use cases. These solutions, built and maintained by AWS experts and partners, offer ready-to-deploy options with flexible, customizable architectures. One of the key benefits of AWS Solutions is that they come with no licensing costs—you only pay for the AWS services you use, ensuring cost efficiency while scaling as needed. Attendees gained valuable insights into how AWS Solutions can drive innovation, improve scalability, and optimize operations—all while maintaining agility and addressing critical business needs.

Here’s what makes AWS Solutions stand out

Purpose-built solutions for business and technology challenges

AWS Solutions are purpose-built services, software packages, and customizable architectures from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its partners, designed to address specific business and technology challenges. These ready-to-deploy solutions come with detailed instructional guidance, making it easier for organizations to innovate and meet their needs. Many AWS Solutions are open-source, allowing businesses to customize and scale them to suit unique requirements.

Industry-specific and cross-industry innovation

Built on over a decade of AWS experience, these solutions tackle industry-specific and cross-industry challenges, offering advanced technologies such as analytics, AI, blockchain, databases, and IoT. They also support critical business processes like ERP, migration, and modernization, ensuring businesses can optimize their operations and maintain competitiveness.

Expertly developed and constantly updated

Experts and trusted partners develop AWS Solutions, which are continually updated to incorporate the latest innovations. They’re curated for faster discovery, enabling businesses to quickly find relevant solutions and achieve quicker results through pre-built configurations, deployable code, and best practices.

Comprehensive support for key business functions

In addition to supporting core business functions, AWS Solutions cover key operational areas like cloud operations, security, networking, and resilience. This comprehensive support allows businesses to optimize performance, enhance security, and scale effectively. Open-source customization further ensures flexibility, enabling companies to tailor solutions to their specific environments.

Rapid deployment for faster innovation

By exploring the AWS Solutions Library, companies can find and implement solutions quickly, driving innovation, scalability, and agility to meet today’s evolving challenges.

Highlighted Cloud Solutions

The portfolio of pre-built AWS Solutions is extensive, offering over 90 options to address a wide range of challenges across various industries. These solutions are designed to streamline processes, enhance innovation, and give businesses the tools they need to succeed in a competitive landscape.

During our event, we highlighted two essential AWS Solutions and demonstrated how they can be leveraged to drive business growth, improve efficiency, and solve specific industry problems.

Generative AI for your business: rapid and secure implementation without compromising privacy

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, companies are eager to leverage generative AI solutions to boost performance, enhance productivity, and streamline operations. However, many organizations face significant challenges when it comes to implementing these AI technologies effectively. Concerns over data security, privacy, and the responsible use of AI are at the forefront of decision-making. For instance, some companies have prohibited the use of platforms like ChatGPT due to fears of data breaches and the lack of control over sensitive information.

Additionally, the lack of in-house AI expertise often hinders companies from integrating these advanced tools into their workflows, causing hesitation and missed opportunities for innovation. The complexity of deploying AI-powered solutions while maintaining security and compliance further complicates the journey. As companies look for ways to harness the power of AI without compromising on privacy or requiring deep technical expertise, solutions like AWS's Generative AI Application Builder offer a way forward, providing a secure, scalable, and user-friendly platform to unlock the potential of AI.

Presented by Fabian Labat, the Generative AI Application Builder on AWS is a comprehensive solution that simplifies the development and deployment of AI applications. Designed with a modular, extensible architecture, it enables businesses to quickly integrate AI technologies like large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and conversational interfaces into their operations. The solution is ideal for companies looking to leverage AI without requiring deep technical expertise, offering a streamlined approach to building applications such as chatbots, text generation tools, and conversational search.

One of the standout features is its LLM integration, supporting models like Amazon Titan via Amazon Bedrock and models deployed through Amazon SageMaker. This allows businesses to experiment with and deploy AI-driven applications quickly. The no-code deployment wizard further simplifies the process, making it accessible even to teams with minimal AI experience. Additionally, the open-source architecture allows for customization and flexibility, with connectors to LangChain and AWS Lambda that enable businesses to modify or extend the solution based on their unique needs.

The solution also supports Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) through Amazon Kendra, enhancing AI accuracy by pulling relevant data from enterprise knowledge bases. This ensures more accurate responses in applications like question-answering systems. Security and compliance are core to the solution’s design, leveraging AWS's Well-Architected principles with tools like Amazon Cognito and IAM roles to provide robust data protection and ensure adherence to enterprise-level security standards.

Built on a serverless architecture using AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon API Gateway, the solution is designed for high availability, scalability, and cost efficiency. It integrates with AWS CloudFormation for automated provisioning and Amazon CloudWatch for real-time performance monitoring, ensuring seamless scaling without the need to manage underlying infrastructure.

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Deployment dashboard architecture (when deployed with VPC option disabled) extracted from the Generative AI Application Builder on AWS  Implementation Guide available 👉 here

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Deployment dashboard architecture (when deployed with VPC option enabled) extracted from the Generative AI Application Builder on AWS  Implementation Guide available 👉 here

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Key benefits

• Accelerated AI Development: Rapid deployment and experimentation with pre-configured AI models, reducing time-to-value with a no-code deployment wizard.
• Flexibility and Extensibility: Modular and open-source architecture allows for easy customization, integration of additional AWS services, and connection with third-party tools.
• Cost Optimization: Serverless architecture ensures you only pay for the resources you use, making it cost-efficient as AI workloads scale.
• Enterprise-Grade Security: Built with AWS Well-Architected principles, the solution ensures robust security through user authentication, encryption, and granular access control using Amazon Cognito and IAM roles.
• High Scalability and Availability: Leverages AWS services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon S3, ensuring seamless scalability and high availability without requiring infrastructure management.
• Improved Accuracy with RAG: Integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Amazon Kendra to retrieve data from enterprise knowledge bases, enhancing the accuracy and relevance of AI responses.
• Support for Diverse AI Use Cases: Tailored for various applications, such as conversational AI, text generation, and question answering, making it versatile for different business needs.
• Multi-Model Comparison: Enables businesses to test and compare multiple large language models (LLMs), ensuring they select the most cost-effective and accurate model for their specific tasks.

Common use cases

• Conversational AI: Deploy AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants for customer support, sales inquiries, and automated interactions.
• Text Generation and Summarization: Generate or summarize text for applications like content creation, report generation, or document summarization.
• Question Answering: Use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with enterprise knowledge bases to provide accurate, business-specific responses to user queries.
• Customer Support Automation: Automate responses to typical customer service queries or support ticketing systems, reducing response times and improving efficiency.
• Personalized User Experiences: Integrate AI-driven recommendations or conversational interfaces to create tailored user experiences, improving engagement.
• Multi-Model Comparison: Experiment with and compare different large language models (LLMs) to determine the best fit for tasks such as text generation, customer interaction, or decision-making processes.
• Content Creation and Editing: Leverage AI to assist with drafting, editing, or enhancing content for marketing, communication, or editorial purposes.
• Data Retrieval and Insights: Enhance business intelligence by integrating AI-powered tools to extract relevant information from large data sets or knowledge bases.

With Fabian's demonstration of the solution, we saw in action how the Generative AI Application Builder on AWS can provide businesses with a powerful, flexible, and secure platform to develop and scale AI applications without compromising privacy.

Simulate real-world traffic stress with AWS Distributed Load Testing

Luis and Héctor took the stage to demonstrate how Distributed Load Testing on AWS empowers companies to thoroughly performance test their applications by simulating a wide range of real-world conditions. They showcased how the solution enables businesses to stress-test their systems under various traffic loads, geographic distributions, and peak scenarios, providing invaluable insights into potential bottlenecks and performance issues. By leveraging AWS's scalable infrastructure, companies can simulate tens of thousands of concurrent users, ensuring their applications are ready to handle high-demand environments while maintaining stability and responsiveness.

One of the standout features of this solution is its ability to simulate tens of thousands of concurrent users. This allows businesses to evaluate how their applications handle significant traffic loads and sudden spikes in usage. The simulated users can be distributed across multiple AWS regions, providing a global perspective on the application's performance, which is essential for businesses with a broad geographical reach. The solution also offers customizable testing using JMeter, enabling users to tailor tests to specific scenarios, integrate test data, and perform detailed, use-case-specific evaluations.

With test scheduling and concurrency capabilities, businesses can automate tests to run at specified times or intervals, such as daily, weekly, or even monthly. This feature is particularly useful for organizations with integrated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes, allowing them to ensure ongoing performance validation for new releases. Moreover, the platform supports real-time monitoring of tests, providing live feedback on key performance metrics like response times, success rates, and errors through an intuitive CloudWatch-powered dashboard.

The solution's support for multiple protocols—including HTTP, HTTPS, WebSocket, JDBC, JMS, FTP, and gRPC—makes it versatile and suitable for various applications. This flexibility ensures that businesses can conduct thorough performance testing, regardless of the application architecture or services involved.

Distributed Load Testing on AWS features a user-friendly web console for managing and monitoring tests. Users can easily schedule and execute tests, while the backend, powered by Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, handles the load generation. The backend's serverless nature ensures that the solution can automatically scale to meet the requirements of even the most demanding test scenarios. Test results are stored in Amazon S3 and DynamoDB, allowing for post-test analysis, while real-time test data can be visualized through AWS IoT Core if live monitoring is enabled.

Architecture diagram extracted from the Distributed Load Testing on AWS Implementation Guide available 👉 here

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The solution offers numerous benefits to businesses, starting with the early detection of performance issues. By running load tests before launching an application, companies can identify bottlenecks and potential failures, ensuring a smoother launch. Additionally, the ability to simulate users from various geographical locations allows for global performance evaluation, ensuring that the application delivers a consistent user experience regardless of location.

One of the most significant advantages of Distributed Load Testing on AWS is its cost savings. As a fully serverless solution, companies only pay for the resources they use during test execution, eliminating the need for costly, dedicated testing infrastructure. The solution also integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, allowing for continuous performance evaluation as new application versions are deployed, ensuring consistent performance across releases. Furthermore, its high scalability enables the solution to handle large test volumes automatically without requiring manual intervention.

Common use cases

• Pre-Launch Testing: Validate that web or mobile applications can handle expected traffic levels before going live.
• Peak Traffic Management: Ensure the infrastructure can support sudden traffic spikes during promotions, sales, or special events.
• Performance Optimization: Identify performance bottlenecks, such as inefficient code, slow database queries, or network latency issues.
• CI/CD Integration: Automate load testing within continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines to ensure consistent application performance after each update or release.
• Global Performance Evaluation: Simulate users from different regions to test the application's global performance and provide insights into how it behaves across various locations.
• Disaster Recovery and Failover Testing: Test the robustness of disaster recovery systems and ensure failover mechanisms can handle sudden load increases during outages or system failures.
• Stress Testing for New Features: Test the impact of newly added features or components to ensure they do not negatively affect the application's overall performance under heavy loads.

Final thoughts

The event highlighted AWS Solutions' vast capabilities and demonstrated the immense value they can bring to businesses looking to innovate, scale, and enhance efficiency. Remarkably, 99% of the audience was unaware of AWS Solutions' full potential before attending, making this a pivotal moment for many organizations seeking to transform their operations.

This event was a testament to our strong partnership with AWS and our ongoing commitment to helping businesses in the region harness the full power of cloud technologies. As an AWS Partner, Switch is dedicated to guiding companies through their cloud journeys, offering expertise and tailored solutions that drive business growth and innovation. Whether optimizing application performance, leveraging generative AI, or ensuring scalability with AWS infrastructure, Switch is here to provide the knowledge, tools, and support you need.

We look forward to continuing to empower organizations, helping them stay connected with the global AWS community and thrive in today’s digital-first world. If you're ready to explore how AWS Solutions can elevate your business, our team at Switch is here to support you every step of the way. Let's talk!

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