D55 Are Proud AWS GameDay World Championship Winners Of 2022!

At D55, we couldn’t be more over the moon to announce that we are the official 2022 winners of AWS GameDay World Championship! It took a big team effort that paid off tremendously.

It’s been a great learning experience for our development team and is proof of the amazing abilities of our much-valued team.

What Is GameDay?

The GameDay World Championship is an annual collaborative challenge, held across the world, by Amazon Web Services. The challenge simulates real-world problems, and hundreds of teams compete against each other, and the clock, to go in blind and solve problems to the best of their abilities. It’s an open-ended challenge and there is no one right answer! The only goal is to move up that leaderboard – and you’ve only got a few hours to do it.

What It Takes To Win

The problems that the teams come up against can be very diverse, so you need an extensive knowledge of the AWS ecosystem and be good at working under pressure.

Semi-Final

Our team, led by Martyn, made it through the qualifier round on 31^st August. The theme of the problems that his team had to solve revolved around sustainability, with the team accruing points for how sustainable the implemented solutions were – such as ensuring the most efficient processors were used, database queries were optimised, and auto-scaling solutions were implemented.

The team won first place by a margin of several million points due to some clever use of warm-start Lambdas and in-memory caching, and a unicorn trophy was promised for making it so far!

Scoring in the top 5 and landing a place in the final already demonstrated how far ahead of many other AWS providers the experts at D55 were, but then came the final…

The Final

D55 competed in the AWS GameDay final on 28^th September, knowing that a trip to Vegas was up for grabs…

In the final, AWS had built a demo version of a transportation system such as that used by Uber or Lyft, but this one used Unicorns instead of cars!

The system would receive requests for pickups throughout the three-hour game period, with simulated large events like concerts throughout. The system suffered from many issues such as failing to identify fraudulent requests, sending the wrong type of Unicorn (Walking, Flying or Group) or sending the same Unicorn to two places at once. Every journey earned the D55 team some points, but incorrect or slow journeys cost money; therefore, they had to race against the clock to fix the multitude of issues as quickly as possible. Those fixes gained points at a higher rate for a longer period, plus the team had to be ready for the planned large events that could come through at any second.

Through a mixture of debugging, bug fixing, coding, configuration and Unicorn strategy, the D55 team managed to edge above the other 44 competitors to grab the title of WINNER!!

Final Thoughts

Vegas, here we come!

Our team have pulled the impossible off here, beating out every single other AWS specialist competitor. It takes commitment to achieve the level of competency required to reach the later stages of an AWS GameDay World Championship, let alone to win the final. Our team shows each and every day just how dedicated they are to what they do, and the AWS-sponsored trip to re:Invent in Vegas is well deserved.

Well Done Team!

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