Thoughts on AWS re:Invent Day 1
Published on 29 Nov 2016 · Filed in Musing · 391 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)As I wrap up Day 1 of AWS re:Invent 2016 in Las Vegas (can I consider today to be day 1?), I wanted to capture a quick summary of thoughts about the sessions, the content, the attendees, and the event (not necessarily in that order).
First, here are some links to the liveblogs I posted from today’s sessions:
Liveblog: Scaling to Your First 10 Million Users
Liveblog: Hybrid Architectures, Bridging the Gap to the Cloud
Liveblog: Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck with EC2
Overall, the sessions have been pretty decent so far. Some portions of some of the sessions feel more like a sales pitch than an educational session, but I’m sure that’s the case at other events as well (yes, I’m talking about VMworld). I’m not yet sure if the nature of what AWS does/offers lends itself to subjectively feel more like a sales pitch or not. Case in point: how does a presenter suggest to attendees—for solid technical reasons—that they should consider using a service like Route 53 or DynamoDB or SQS (or any one of a dozen other services) without it also sounding like a sales pitch?
From an attendee perspective, I’ve been “badge watching” (is that bad?), and I’m noticing lots of so-called traditional enterprise companies here. Whether that signals a move to the public cloud or just interest in moving to the public cloud is a question I’ll leave to the clouderati to debate. Conversations I’ve overheard (and no, I’m not eavesdropping!) range anywhere from in-depth technical development conversations about how to re-architect an application using Lambda to laments about how someone’s boss has put the kibosh on a migration of any services to AWS.
Finally, from an event perspective: this event is huge. Word has it there are between 32,000 and 33,000 attendees, and it shows. The event is spread across three different Las Vegas hotels (the Wynn, the Venetian/Palazzo, and the Mirage), and rooms in all three venues are full. Lines are long. Sessions are waitlisted. Foot traffic is insane. One piece of advice I would offer potential future attendees: don’t bother booking back-to-back sessions, you won’t be able to get from point A to point B any time soon.
That’s it from day 1 here at re:Invent. I’ll have more liveblogging tomorrow, so check out all the posts tagged “reInvent2016”. Thanks!