Andy Jassy’s key-note was the highlight of Wednesday. The hall was massive. Even still, we received a warning get there early for a decent seat, although the screens and sound system is good enough to see and hear anywhere. I was fortunate enough to be quite close to the stage.
The Trade Hall was in full swing when we got in there – the swag was flowing as were the crowds. At some point, I’ll set up a post to visit the collection of swag I collected. I think personally the swag highlights are the limited edition AWS shirts – that I got by participating in a series of mini-challenges which encourage you to learn more while at re:Invent, i.e. AWS Robot builder and Alexa shirts (pic ) and the reInvent pins.
The afternoon was spent in a session on Serverless, a Neptune overview and a talk about Kubernetes for Database. These were all were amazing sessions. However, the serverless talk was stand out. The presentation was aimed directly at engineers, which was great.
In the evening, we attended dinner at one of the restaurants at the Venetian. AWS always books out a lot of the restaurants for private events. However, we found that you can get an invite from the trade stalls and meet some like minded people. We spoke to a team from Capital One, which was really exciting. For those who aren’t familiar; Capital One started their AWS transition in 2014, and are now a successful case-study in how to transform technology, staff and culture when moving to the cloud. You can read more about this in Jonathan Allen’s blog post series here.