So it’s been a while since my last update. I’ve been super busy on customer projects and deployments. There’s been some Architecture design and well as large scale implementation projects.
But the main awesome news and activities of the last month has been being able to participate in Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2016. It is the largest annual convention for AWS and takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is full of keynote announcements, training sessions, hands-on labs, certification exams, and a vendor expo. It takes place over the course of a week, though the main conference is considered to be 2 days of the Wednesday and Thursday. Now many technical people across the globe will have blogged about all the specific technical announcements. I’ll hit some of them here, but the main point of this blog entry will be to try and describe the overall experience for someone who hasn’t been before. And maybe some tips to help navigate the chaos that is Vegas and re:Invent.
Planning what to see
Amazon always announces most of the courses and talks in a good timeframe before re:Invent is to take place. Much of the pre-set agenda is paid training courses. These are often quite good, but should be studied carefully as your choices should really take into account your experience level or job position, to get the best value out of them. Some are business oriented, and arranged more for project managers or sales partner teams. Others are much more technical, for AWS newbies, or very experienced users (from System Administrators to Developers).
Go through the schedule, find your budget, and book the courses you think will be good. They do fill up relatively fast. These courses are generally in high demand, so be quick.
Arrive the weekend before
To be able to take in the full amount of options and activities during the week, arrive early. The weekend before is a good idea. If you’re in a position like I am of being a consultant, it might be a combined training, sales, networking, certification week. It was going to be full-on. So we arrived in on the Sunday, and were able to get settled in about midday. So the afternoon was able to be about getting our bearings and sorting out where we needed to be an when. Fortunately our hotel was directly across the road from the main location for the conference. So a 5 minute walk and we could be there. Depending on where you are it could be a walk, or a taxi/uber ride.
A good plan if you get there in that weekend, is to get registration done on Sunday afternoon/evening. They open the venue and allow early registration pickup. Best to head along to this unless you want to be up super early on Monday. Your registration will get you the first bunch of swag. AWS participants this year got a nice hoodie, and an Amazon Echo Dot! Thats a mini version of the Echo running Alexa. About the size of a hockey puck, and should be interesting to play with (I haven’t really started yet)
Sunday evening we already had client dinners booked. So we were somewhat off and running getting business done.
The First 2 days
Monday and Tuesday was when my booked training sessions would be happening, and it’s best to get important training done on these 2 days, the rest of the week becomes more about announcements and tech. The sessions on these days may be part or full day events, running from 9 to 5, with a lunch break. Mine were full day events, so after grabbing breakfast I headed off for the courses.
My first session was the DevOps Certification Bootcamp. This is designed to run you through the items required for the AWS DevOps Certification. You are given an environment running CodeDeploy, CodePipeline and with access to a code respository. As the class progresses you perform lab tasks against this environment. Deploying a new application, upgrading the application, and performing a blue/green deployment between the 2 you now have. This is an excellent insight into these services and how to use them. I expect to do more study before I take the DevOps exam, but this was a good start.
Tuesdays session was the Cloud Transformation training. This is not a technical session, but more Project management or Project Lead oriented course. It was designed to run you through the process of arranging your organisation in readiness for moving your technology or I.T services to cloud providers. From organisational structure, to hiring skillsets, and identifying priorities and possible complications. I wasn’t sure this would be my thing, but being a consultant now and AWS partner, this ended up being quite useful. It’s likely I will end up needing to use the knowledge that came across here for future projects.
Just a quick note on meals. AWS provides a breakfast and lunch each day. A area of the location is set aside for the many many tables required to feed everyone. Try and get to breakfast around 7-7.30. It’s just before it gets busy.
Tuesday Night
After the important business of training, Tuesday night starts off the interesting events and probably introduces the stuff that might get you excited about re:Invent. First off, the Expo portion opens for an intro night. Vendors market their wares, other stands show future items coming, but it ends up being a mad rush for free swag. Tshirts were given away almost everywhere, and other cool items like drones were being raffled off. The only drawback here is that all the vendors will need to scan your badge, this is where the spam starts. If you are organised that’s not a big deal. It also may allow you to seen vendors that may be useful or interesting for you. I came across Fugue, Zerto, and Cloudcheckr (Though I use them already).
Also on Tuesday night is something that should not be missed. “Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton”, as the title give it away it is presented by James Hamilton, a AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer. It’s a more technical session and he often goes through how AWS designs, implements, and operates at the scale it does. Providing stats about the insane growth they face every year. This year it involved a team from NASA describing how they use AWS for data analysis. As always re:Invent sessions are streamed and available online after the fact. Check it out if you are interested…
Wednesday
This starts re:Invent proper. The first item of the day (after breakfast at least), is the Keynote presented by Andy Jassy. The first day keynote starts of general and dives into infrastructure and platform services additions. New Compute instance sizes, storage options, new AI based services, and IoT options. Each item will be interesting to different people in different ways, but that’s just due to the large breadth of things you are able to do on the AWS platform.
Thursday morning also starts of with a Keynote, this time presented by Werner Vogels, the CTO Engineer Evangelist extraordinaire of AWS. This presentation went into how important strategy and agility is, not just for AWS, but for it’s customers as well, and really pushed the fast growing “Serverless” architecture movement. Then Werner went into more technical announcements of products, services, and features. A few items peaked my interest, Elastic GPUs, and AWS Systems Manager. At the end of his keynote Werner also always announces who the DJ is for the re:Play party, this year being Martin Garrix.
An important thing to note is as the keynotes happen, AWS releases updates to the agenda for the week. New talks about the services just announced will appear, keep tabs on the agenda and book the items you want. They will fill up very fast. The rest of these 2 days are open with many other sessions, labs, and certification opportunities. I was able to complete my SysOps certification on Wednesday, and took hands-on lab sessions on Thursday.
Thursday night re:Play!
Then there is the party. re:Play takes place in the evening after the rest of the day has finished. It’s huge, and has all kinds of things to do. Not only is there a big dance floor for the generally epic DJ sessions, but the bars are open all night, and there are many activities. This year there was a climbing wall, laser maze, dodgeball arena, and human foosball field. This is a great time to relax, most of the week is done, take it easy, mingle, and really try and take in the atmosphere.
Friday also continues the agenda with talks, but stops around 1pm. And depending on how much you got up to at the party, you may not want to attempt to much.
Networking
A large part of the overall convention is the networking opportunities. Whether it’s during lunch breaks, in sessions, or at the expo, you will have the chance to talk to other AWS employees and users. Everyone is there for the same reason, and at meals tables are often shared and you can strike up conversation with people from all over the globe. Sometimes in sessions you may be put into teams as well, which will often lead to you learning different perspectives.
Overall
As I had not been to a re:Invent before I thought this was a great experience, and highly recommend anyone go if they are using AWS. It may open up more possibilities on how you use the platform. You will meet many people, and be introduced to options you may not have seen before. Being it is Las Vegas it can be a bit of a sensory overload, it’s busy and there is constant light and noise all of the time. Make sure you organise leisure time every so often during the week (it’s Vegas, so there is plenty of non-work activities to break and do). I’ll leave you with an image of my downtime activities. I’m a speed freak so it was awesome. I will be back soon with more technical posts again. Hope you all are well, Christmas is coming, so make sure you take a break.
