Last week, we trai­nees had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to spend a who­le day at the AWS of­fice in Mu­nich with our ana­ly­tics team. The oc­ca­si­on was AWS Im­mersi­on Day, which was or­ga­ni­zed espe­ci­al­ly for us and fo­cu­sed en­ti­re­ly on mo­dern ap­proa­ches to data processing.

The day be­gan with a re­la­xed round of in­tro­duc­tions and a brief pre­sen­ta­ti­on of the va­rious AWS ser­vices that are re­le­vant in the field of data ana­ly­tics. Ho­we­ver, what made this event tru­ly spe­cial was that we were able to get straight to work: di­vi­ded into small groups, we were tas­ked with im­ple­men­ting a rea­li­stic use case using real AWS tools.

Af­ter some brain­stor­ming, we de­ci­ded on a task that is very clo­se to our dai­ly work in the ana­ly­tics field: We wan­ted to build an ETL pipe­line that au­to­ma­ti­cal­ly con­verts an Ex­cel spreadsheet into Ice­berg for­mat, stores it in an S3 bu­cket, and then makes it ana­lyza­ble with Athena—including au­to­ma­tic re­port­ing. The goal was to au­to­ma­te the en­ti­re pro­cess as much as pos­si­ble and break it down into a real-world use case.

One high­light of the day was that we were able to use KIRO for this. KIRO is an AI-ba­sed de­ve­lo­per en­vi­ron­ment from AWS that si­gni­fi­cant­ly sim­pli­fies many steps. Not only did this make pipe­line de­ve­lo­p­ment fas­ter than usu­al, it also crea­ted a plea­sant, open working at­mo­sphe­re: ever­yo­ne was able to con­tri­bu­te their own ide­as and try them out right away, re­gard­less of their pre­vious co­ding or AWS ex­per­ti­se. The com­bi­na­ti­on of KIRO and Glue made work much ea­sier in some areas.

Af­ter­ward, we com­pared our so­lu­ti­on with tho­se of the other groups and saw many dif­fe­rent ap­proa­ches and ide­as. We were par­ti­cu­lar­ly im­pres­sed by how clo­se­ly and pro­duc­tively we work­ed tog­e­ther as a team, in­clu­ding across teams with our ana­ly­tics col­le­agues. For many of us, it was our first di­rect cont­act with mo­dern cloud data en­gi­nee­ring tools in a real, prac­ti­cal context.

Our con­clu­si­on: Im­mersi­on Day hel­ped us grow not only pro­fes­sio­nal­ly but also per­so­nal­ly as a team. It was ex­ci­ting to see how dif­fe­rent skills come tog­e­ther and pro­du­ce a func­tio­ning re­sult. The re­la­xed at­mo­sphe­re at the AWS of­fice and the di­rect ex­ch­an­ge with the ex­perts on site en­su­red that we grew even clo­ser tog­e­ther as a trai­nee group. We are al­re­a­dy loo­king for­ward to our next joint prac­ti­cal as­sign­ment – whe­ther in the cloud or in the office.