Speaking as Part of the ColdFusion Summit 2016 Customer Showcase

Posted 21 September 2016

This year’s ColdFusion Summit features a new track of sessions focused on customer success\/showcase stories, which I think is a great addition to the program. I’ve always enjoyed when technical conferences have real people come out and talk about how they solved problems with a specific technology — problems and all. I don’t care a whit for sales sessions where a company says “Our product is sooo great, go buy it now, it’ll solve all your problems!” I like hearing when a company says “We used X because it helped us solve this problem, here’s how we did it, and here are some of the issues we ran into.”

I’m pleased that I get to speak as part of this track.

My presentation is “Accessible Video Anywhere with ColdFusion and AWS.” I’ve been speaking about ColdFusion and Amazon Web Services for a couple of years now, and I thought it was high time that I showed how we leverage multiple AWS services in our educational production workflow at Hopkins.

Here’s the session description:

Developing and delivering tens of thousands of hours of video content every year isn’t a simple task. You’ve got to encode for a variety of devices, and deliver the video as quickly as possible to consumers all over the globe. To add to the complexity of this work, laws around the world require that you caption every video to make it accessible to as many people as possible.

In this session, we’ll look at how Johns Hopkins has built a custom video encoding, captioning, and delivery pipeline with ColdFusion as the controller tying together numerous different services – most of which run in Amazon Web Services (AWS). We’ll look at a whole host of technologies in AWS: Lambda for serverless computing, Elastic Transcoder for transcoding, DynamoDB for data storage, Simple Notification Service and Simple Email Service for process notification and delivery, and CloudFront for global content delivery. We’ll also see how ColdFusion is the glue that holds the AWS, third-party captioning API, and content management systems together. You’ll leave with a blueprint for building your own multi-service ColdFusion/AWS hybrid app, and learn how to avoid some of the pitfalls we encountered along the way.

The session is a lot less about code and much more about how you can put together a series of services to make an automated production pipeline with ColdFusion at the center. It’s great to be talking about a project which made such a difference for me and my team, and I hope that you’ll be there to hear all about it!

Categories: AWS ColdFusion Conferences