Title: AWS re:Inforce 2024 - Empowering small teams with Amazon ECS Fargate and Datadog (TDR306-S)

Insights:

• Introduction and Agenda: The session was co-hosted by Amber Binway from Datadog and Michael Wise from Kirkpatrick Price. The agenda included an overview of Kirkpatrick Price's cloud adoption journey, the benefits of AWS Fargate, and the integration with Datadog for enhanced security and observability.
• Kirkpatrick Price Overview: Kirkpatrick Price is a licensed CPA firm specializing in helping clients meet compliance goals through quality testing and efficient audits using their Online Audit Manager platform.
• Cloud Adoption Journey: Kirkpatrick Price transitioned from a single server setup to a small stack co-location, and eventually to AWS cloud services. They chose AWS for its comprehensive documentation and services, which aligned with their needs.
• Challenges and Solutions: With exponential growth, Kirkpatrick Price needed a robust compute platform that reduced management burdens without increasing headcount. They adopted Amazon Fargate for its operational efficiency, integration with Terraform, and simplified capacity management.
• Amazon Fargate Benefits: Fargate reduced operational workload by managing worker node configurations, patching, and scaling, allowing the team to focus on application-level tasks.
• Datadog Integration: Datadog provided a suite of tools for cloud security management, application performance monitoring, and centralized alerting, which were crucial for Kirkpatrick Price's small team to manage security and performance efficiently.
• Datadog's Security and Observability: Datadog's platform offers deep integrations with AWS, providing visibility into both performance and security aspects. It includes features like file integrity monitoring, process activity tracking, and centralized logging.
• Efficiency and Confidence: The combination of AWS Fargate and Datadog tools enabled Kirkpatrick Price to maintain high security and availability standards with a small team, enhancing their confidence in managing application performance and security incidents.

Quotes:

• "We plan on going through how Fargate helps empower small teams and how Datadog helps to enhance all of that."
• "We provide quality testing... to make sure that they have the appropriate security controls implemented."
• "We decided to make the jump from just being a co-location company... to using cloud services."
• "Our CTO challenged us and said, hey, I want a rock solid compute platform that lessens the burden for our team's management."
• "We picked Amazon Fargate... It reduced operational workload at the cluster level."
• "We needed a partner that could really help us understand what was going on from a security and both an operational performance level with our application."
• "Datadog provided a suite of tools that really had a synergistic quality for what we were trying to do."
• "Your security is only as good as your coverage."
• "When you take the Datadog tooling and we take ECS Fargate and we bundle this all into a ECS task definition, that provides small teams with that efficiency that they're really looking for."
• "The tools we've talked about amplify the team's ability to confidently respond to application performance and security incidents."