Earlier this month, Flickr and SmugMug teams joined other members of the global cloud computing community at a learning conference hosted by AWS called re:Invent. Held in Las Vegas, Nevada, the event was a mix of inspiring keynote speakers, groundbreaking announcements, and opportunities for professional development through certifications and training. It was an exciting and enriching experience that highlighted the power of growth, innovation, and connection, and Flickr was proud to be a part of it.
SmugMug & Flickr CEO Don MacAskill Reflects on AWS Partnership
Photo by Erik Giberti
18 Years of Innovation with AWS S3
As the first customer of AWS S3, SmugMug and Flickr CEO Don MacAskill shared valuable insights at the conference about our long-standing partnership with AWS and how it fuels our growth and innovation. Over the past 18 years, we’ve stored hundreds of billions of photos –millions of customers’ memories—on S3. The new S3 Metadata feature enhances our ability to explore and analyze object metadata, making it easier and more cost-effective to track data evolution. Listen to Don break it all down here.
Photo by Lee Lazon
Leveraging AWS to Shape the Future of Photography
Flickr and SmugMug provide a safe and secure place for more than 100 million customers to store, share and sell billions of photos every day, so the need to continue understanding and collaborating with services like AWS is paramount. From engineers, to data analysts, to administrators and executives, re:Invent offered an opportunity for staff here at Flickr and SmugMug to connect, celebrate and explore the possibilities of where advances in technology may take us in the future.
Some of the exciting announcements from the event included a new feature in preview called S3 Metadata. This feature automatically generates rich metadata for every object in Amazon S3 buckets. When asked about the new feature, Andrew Shieh, Principal Engineer at SmugMug, was quoted on AWS’ site on how it can affect platforms like ours.
Also a topic of discussion at re:Invent was Amazon’s Q developer: an AI-powered assistant that helps developers and IT professionals with software development tasks, something our very own Manager of Data Science and Engineering Dr. Geoff Ryder helped develop. SmugMug will use Amazon Q Developer to automatically analyze metrics, logs, and operational events across systems, enabling the ability to diagnose most issues in under 20 minutes and up to 50% faster. This improves operational efficiency and allows for more time to be spent on support and building the platform to help photographers grow their digital storefronts. You can read more about how Amazon’s Q Developer aids data modeling here at Flickr and SmugMug in this recently featured AWS blog article.
Flickr and SmugMug teams along with AWS staff at re:Invent 2024, photo courtesy of Eddie Yao
For a more detailed overview of re:Invent 2024, including feature announcements, keynotes speeches and more, make sure to check out AWS official re:Invent 2024 recap.