AWS re:Invent minus the sessions
āIām going into airplane mode,ā I texted my wife. Now I could relax for an hour or so. The Uber driver was smart. When he saw the half mile long line of cars in the departure lane, he had asked me, āShall I drop you at arrivals? You just need to go up the escalator.ā
āSure,ā I said. Glad to avoid wasting 15 minutes. I had come up the escalator a few minutes later and found a long line at security. It was to be expected. re:Invent is always the Monday after Thanksgiving. Everyone is going back home. What should have normally taken 10 minutes took 45. I barely made it to the gate in time. As luck would have it, the flight was delayed. So I had just enough time to buy a packaged breakfast and hasten back to board.
I have been going to re:Invent since 2016. Each year there were 10,000 more people than the previous year. This year there were 50,000 attendees. The event was spread across 14 hotels in Las Vegas.
Despite the spread, every breakout session was crowded. I will not go into the details of how you have to stand in line for half an hour to get into any session. You can read that on plenty of other blogs. In fact, if you just want to watch videos of the talks I recommend heading straight to https://reinventvideos.com/. You can search and filter by level all AWS re:Invent talks from 2012 there.
Walking between hotels takes almost half an hour if they are adjacent - because you have to walk through the casinos. If they are not adjacent, you have to take the shuttle, which I think is approximately every half hour. So I did not really go to any other hotel. I had decided to spend all my time at the Sands Expo/Venetian and that is what I did. In fact, next year, I am going to even stay at the Venetian. Just for bragging rights - the Venetian gets sold out first. And most of my events happen there.
If you cannot get a room at the Venetian though, Iāll recommend a wonderful second choice. The Wynn Towers. Iām not sure if the Palazzo has this advantage, but if you stay at the Wynn Towers (not the Wynn) you can come out the Towers entrance and go straight to the Sands Expo in less than 10 minutes without walking through a single casino. I think the Palazzo will probably have you walk in front of a store or two. But from the Wynn Towers - nothing. The Sands Expo is right across the street and around the corner.
This year at the Expo hall there was a developers lounge. We had a small section here that was manned by user group leaders. User group leaders from around the world took turns providing information about local communities to help bring aws users together. Which reminds me about the AWS Community Day I helped organize in the Bay Area this year. I had wanted to know more about how they did the community day in Japan - JAWS is one of the most active AWS communities - so I had traveled to Japan this summer. There I had met Shigeru Numaguchi. I met him again at the user group booth.
Normally, you just need to wear a t-shirt to these events. But on Monday when I took this picture with Shigeru, I had to attend the AWS heroes annual get together. Thatās why I am wearing a shirt. We had Jeff Barr, Ian Massingham, Werner Vogels and other dignitaries join us at the Heroes Welcome.
This year we also had a few distinguished women in tech join us at the Hero dinner on Monday night. They were from India, Japan, Brazil, and Korea. It was a sad testament to the state of affairs in our industry to see that less than 15% of the people at the dinner were women. And that despite us having specially invite some of them. Here is a photo I took with all the women at the dinner. You can see Randall Hunt in the background. He is one of my favorite evangelists.
The dinner was at The Foundation Room. Now I capitalize it, as though it should mean something to you. It likely does not. I had no idea what it was. But trust me, everyone working in Las Vegas knows where it is. Itās entrance is at the bottom of Mandalay Bay. When you get in, the only thing in the room is an elevator. When you are inside the elevator, it goes only to the 62nd floor, The Foundation Room above it, and back down to this entrance. And if you did not know that this room is at the top of the Mandalay Bay (which I didnāt,) the view is spectacular. Well now that I know it is on the top, the view is just as great!
Tuesday night is traditionally the night that the Intuit folks get together. This is one time of the year when I get to meet people from other Intuit sites in person. These are people with whom I have interacted via chat from Mountain View. This year, we met at this place called Minus Five. It was a room lined with ice on the walls, and I imagine maintained at a temperature of -5 degrees celsius. It was like a freezer. When we were outside the ice room we were Intuit people. When we went inside we were like Inuit people - if you know what I mean. Especially with our jackets. We had heavy jackets. But it was still uncomfortable. Later on I came in without a jacket and was fine. I only stayed there for 5 minutes each time. Fortunately, they had another room just outside for us to stand around and have hors d'oeuvres for those of us who did not want to be cold. Here is a picture of the inside of Minus Five.
It was very noisy at Minus five. Gary Danko in the photo above and I wanted to have dinner at a nice quiet place. We walked around but found no quiet place. So we just made a reservation at Delmonicoās for the next afternoon and went back to our rooms and ordered room service.
The infrastructure keynote usually happens on Tuesday night. This year they had it on Monday night. I missed it live because I was at the heroes dinner. Wednesday morning is when Andy Jassyās keynote happens. This is the keynote where they announce most of the new services every year. There is usually a long line that starts forming around 7AM for the keynote starts at 8 AM sharp. Suffice it to say I got to sit very near the front and center of the stage.
The view from the front is always great. I wonāt bore you with the details of what was announced. You can see that, and all other new service and feature announcements here. https://aws.amazon.com/new/ The hardware release this year was the Deep Racer. https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/ It is uses deep learning and reinforcement learning. My neighbour and I commented on the coincidence in the name. We said, āIBMs computer that beat humans at chess was called Deep Blue. Googleās computer that beat humans at go was called Deep Mind.ā Now Amazon released Deep Racer. I know it does not seem connected, but when Andy was making the announcement, it seemed very connected. Especially before he mentioned the name. You should watch the keynote for five minutes or so before the announcement of the Deep Racer.
That reminds me, there was something special in the keynote. You cannot see it on youtube because that video does not show all seven movie sized screens. Apparently in the very first slide-set after the title slide, there was a picture of me. I say slide-set because in the āslideā after the title slide was 7 different slides on the 7 different screens. Many of them showing pictures of AWS users. One of the heroes, Margaret, told me that she saw me in one of the screens. Easter egg.
Wednesday evening was the annual user group leaders get together. We shared tips and said hi to each other. Some of us gave short talks. I did one too.
Thursday morning as usual was allocated to Werner Vogels. Got to sit in front on Thursday as well. I like listening to Werner talk. He talks about technical challenges and solutions.
On Thursday, I also visited the executive summit. Raji Arasu, one of Intuitās executives was giving a presentation to the executives. She also had a fireside chat with the VP of ML at AWS - Swami Sivasubramanian.
I sat in the back because I came late and did not want to disturb the audience. Did you know that for every person who presents at re:Invent, 10 others donāt get an opportunity to present? Have you wanted to present at re:Invent but could not? You can increase your chances of getting accepted by presenting elsewhere first.
You can present at the AWS Community Day. There are several of them each year all over the world. Here is a list https://aws.amazon.com/events/community-day/. If you would like to present at the community day in the Bay Area we have opened up the call for papers. You can submit your proposal now.
I got involved with AWS Community Day two years ago. We organized the first ever ACD outside of Japan in San Francisco. After that it has taken off globally giving local and regional audiences everywhere an opportunity to come together once a year and talk about their AWS experiences. ACD gives speakers new and experienced a stage from which to share their stories of successes and failures - to teach and to learn. You should take advantage of it. Sign up for the next one - either as a presenter or as an attendee (registration page coming soon).
John Varghese is a Cloud Steward at Intuit responsible for the AWS infrastructure of Intuitās Futures Group. He runs the AWS Bay Area meetup in the San Francisco Peninsula Area for both beginners and intermediate AWS users. He has also organized multiple AWS Community Day events in the Bay Area. He runs a Slack channel just for AWS users. You can contact him there directly via Slack. He has a deep understanding of AWS solutions from both strategic and tactical perspectives. An avid AWS user since 2012, he evangelizes AWS and DevOps every chance he gets.
