Re: re:Invent 2022
Reflections on my first AWS re:Invent, both experiential and technical
Every year when re:Invent rolls around, I morph into an avid and eager armchair AWS fan. This year, I got up off my butt and flew with my team to the heart of sin-city, leaving my superwoman-wife behind to take care of our three very little children. With my wife’s ardent support, a pit of guilt in my stomach, and the frustration of two cancelled flights, I finally boarded an airplane to Las Vegas at Newark airport early Monday morning.
Absent any flamboyant gamblers, rowdy bachelors and bachelorettes, swooning honeymooners (or elopers), the cabin was absolutely packed with introverted looking, soft-spoken engineers. Oh, and lots of extraverted-looking, slightly over-friendly sales-people. These sales-people were immediately identifiable by their snappy suits or loud cheery phone conversations. I sat sandwiched between one engineer and one salesperson.
Landing in Vegas several hours later revealed that it was not just my flight that was overrun by nerds. The airport, the MGM Grand, as I later came to learn the entire Las Vegas strip was overflowing with re:Invent conference organizers, staff, and attendees.
I’m not going to bore you with the details of my frustrations with hotel reservations or flight cancellations, but suffice it to say that I eventually got into my 17th floor hotel room, and showered a much needed shower, even if it did fall as a pitiful trickle without any substantial pressure.
I donned my AWS Community Builder T-shirt for the first time ever, and headed toward the MGM Grand conference center to pick up my re:Invent badge. And to see how many people would see the AWS logo and come to me lost in search of directions. The walk from my hotel room to the conference center was almost ten minutes. All in the MGM Grand. I was warned in advance there would be a lot of walking. But ten minutes to the conference center wasn’t very bad.
Most people had already collected their badges, and the line was short and moved quickly. I collected my badge and headed to the dining room for lunch.
What can I say about the Re:Invent dining room at the MGM Grand? It is immense in its size. White table cloths and wait-staff circle maybe a hundred or more circular tables. It’s not terribly fancy, but it is terribly big. I made a beeline for the special meals section and they scanned my badge and brought out a kosher meal a few minutes later. The food was standard microwaved kosher fare, but better than most airplane food I’ve eaten. I was impressed at the extent the AWS team went to accommodate us.
I met up with a couple of awesome engineers who are building something really awesome that I’m hoping to get my hands on soon.
We headed to the Venetian together on one of the re:Invent shuttles. I didn’t know this beforehand, but the Venetian is where the party is at. And by the party I mean, the expo, the swag, the big chess board, and the Data Dog branded slide that slides down to the entrance between the escalators. It’s also where most of the people are.
There was a lot of walking over the four days of re:Invent. Walking to sessions, walking to lunch, walking to meetings, walking to meet people, and walking to events and parties. By the end my feet were sore.
At the end of the conference, the highlights were:
Getting to meet and network with a lot of absolutely awesome people, some for the first time, and others in person for the first time. Including the people behind Functionless, Pulumi, Winglang, and some of my favorite AWS services.
Getting to see some of our team in person.
Three of the sessions I attended were awesome.
Deliver Great Experiences with QUIC included a history of the design decisions that lead to HTTP 3 by Jim Roskind:
How Stable Diffusion was built as a joint presentation between AWS and the Stability team:
Chalk talk NET 304 with some really interesting insights into the design of AWS networking. For a recorded session by the same presenters see:
Some super cool stuff at the expo, and getting to see how AWS Discovering several interesting tools and services that I think will excite our customers.
It wouldn’t be a complete re:Invent if we didn’t talk about announcements from AWS this year. Amazon did okay. Highlights were:
A Serverless OpenSearch offering which was #1 on my Re:Invent Wishlist. It comes with the caveat that there is no scale to zero for now. Without obscene pricing, it seems like this is still going to be better than a cluster I have to scale myself.
A huge amount of improvements to EFS that I didn’t ask for including: elastic throughput, improved latency, 1-day IA lifecycle policies.
Lambda SnapStart that will become more and more useful as it supports languages other than Java.
Amazon VPC Lattice, that will become super awesome when it starts supporting TCP / UDP services
Possibly Amazon DataZone. We’ll see after I have a chance to play with it.
EventBridge Pipes looks pretty awesome. I haven’t gotten to play with it yet sadly.
Cross-account, cross-region CloudWatch, which might not yet be a good enough reason to not buy DataDog for many companies. AWS definitely seems to be taking steps to reclaim this revenue.
It was an incredibly different experience being at re:Invent in person. Watching from an armchair, re:Invent is all about the announcements.
Being there in person, and the keynotes and announcements felt like a very small part of the experience. Being at re:Invent is all about meeting people who are interested in the cloud, getting a chance to explore what other people are doing on AWS, and a lot of walking. I came away from the experience with some new and renewed relationships, a whole host of swag socks, and a pair of very sore legs.