AWS Re:Invent 2022 experience

For those who may not be famil­iar, AWS Re:Invent is a week-long yearly event presen­ted by AWS, one of the lead­ing cloud com­pan­ies, tra­di­tion­ally held in Las Vegas. The main object­ive of the event is to high­light new fea­tures and/or expand on the exist­ing ones, from suc­cess­ful use cases to work­shops that delve into spe­cial­ized cap­ab­il­it­ies, with a broad spec­trum of ser­vices on dif­fer­ent areas such as net­work­ing, com­put­ing, devel­op­ment, stor­age, and oth­ers. Besides, AWS also provides fun activ­it­ies to get firsthand with AWS in a game-like envir­on­ment, an expo with many spon­sors and part­ners, where you can clear your mind and do net­work­ing after the tech­nical know­ledge over­flow that could come your way.

As a first step, the attendees must pre­pare their agenda and select the con­fer­ences they want to attend, it can be hard to plan because of over­lap­ping, demand or the dis­tance between the loc­a­tions, this added to the traffic of Las Vegas which can be dif­fi­cult at times. If one of the con­fer­ences is in high demand, there could be a chance that it gets a “Repeat” which gives more people the oppor­tun­ity to attend. Nev­er­the­less, there is a vast selec­tion of con­fer­ences related to the dif­fer­ent ser­vices and it is likely that you can plan an inter­est­ing set. It is import­ant to be at least 15 minutes before the start of the con­fer­ence, after that the seats are given away by the organ­izers. Also con­sider that most of the con­fer­ences will be avail­able to watch online in case you missed something.

Announce­ments of new ser­vices and fea­tures are mostly presen­ted in Break­out Ses­sions, Work­shops and Key­notes, with the main ones presen­ted in the lat­ter. Nar­row­ing it down to Data related top­ics, this year there were many from Ana­lyt­ics and Man­age­ment to Machine Learn­ing and Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, among the most inter­est­ing were:

• Data Zone was intro­duced as AWS’ Data Man­age­ment ser­vice that can provide an over­view of the data stored in mul­tiple ser­vices as well as to enforce gov­ernance and com­pli­ance, the pre­view of this tool starts in early 2023.
• Glue improve­ments, with the ver­sion 4.0 includ­ing new updated engines, pan­das sup­port, new data formats and the intro­duc­tion to Data Qual­ity into AWS Glue to ensure data in your ETL pipeline is in cor­rect shape for your applications.
• Amazon Athena for Apache Spark
• Improve­ments for Red­shift in terms of secur­ity, avail­ab­il­ity, inges­tion, and integ­ra­tion with Apache Spark
• OpenSearch Server­less.
• New fea­tures in Sage­Maker to enhance team col­lab­or­a­tion with Stu­dio Note­books, easier data-qual­ity issues resolv­ing along with others.
• Doc­u­mentDB Elastic Clusters
• Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integ­ra­tion with Amazon Redshift

Why to attend AWS Re:Invent?

This kind of con­fer­ences present one of the best reas­ons to attend this event which is the pos­sib­il­ity to dis­cuss dir­ectly with the product own­ers of the feature/services so the attendees not only can get imme­di­ate cla­ri­fic­a­tion about the func­tion­al­ity but also can have a dir­ect impact into the dir­ec­tion of the product for the future, and it is even bet­ter with the work­shops where you can test the fea­ture live.

You can also attend boot­camps that either pre­pare you for a cer­ti­fic­a­tion or give you an in-depth and extens­ive look to the ser­vices, this how­ever come with a fee or a part­ner­ship require­ment. For­tu­nately, my cur­rent part­ner­ship with the com­pany I work for allowed me to attend a couple of boot­camp, related to Red­shift and Machine Learn­ing, provid­ing me with a solid found­a­tion about each service.

It is worth men­tion­ing that AWS has taken sus­tain­ab­il­ity into account in recent years, with the inclu­sion of many con­fer­ences related to the topic.

AWS Game Day is part of AWS Gami­fied Learn­ing incent­ives, it serves as an inter­act­ive ses­sion where people are presen­ted an oppor­tun­ity to face real life work scen­arios that encour­age the par­ti­cipants to apply and improve while col­lab­or­at­ing and net­work­ing with their team. The exer­cises are very instruct­ive and there are also AWS people wait­ing to help if any­one gets stuck. There are also a couple of exer­cises ded­ic­ated for spon­sors where usu­ally you must integ­rate AWS ser­vices with the spon­sor tool. Every scen­ario gives points and, in the end, the team with the most points gets to take the prize home, unfor­tu­nately for me I still do not know what it was because my team, des­pite the vali­ant effort, could not top the table.

Part­ners and Spon­sors show pres­ence in the Expo and in Break­out ses­sions where they dis­play the bene­fits of integ­rat­ing their products with AWS. They also present suc­cess­ful use cases where the expan­sion that AWS has had in the diverse types of industry can clearly be seen. For instance, and as a huge sports fan myself, it was very inter­est­ing to see how the Bundes­liga (Germany’s Foot­ball first tier) was rely­ing heav­ily on AWS cap­ab­il­it­ies for the pro­cessing of enorm­ous amounts of sensor data to deliver rel­ev­ant stat­ist­ics not only for the view­ers but also to the teams them­selves so they can also use them for squad and strategy improvement.

It’s more than data-talk – it’s a festival!

And for the cherry on top, on the last day AWS organ­ized a fest­ival-like event with games such as dodge­ball, arch­ery tag, a Riot Games zone with more fun activ­it­ies, foods and drinks, and music with DJs and Mar­tin Gar­rix as head­liner who gave a mem­or­able show.

Over­all, as a first-time attendee I found the event to be a fant­astic oppor­tun­ity to gain exper­i­ence firsthand about new cap­ab­il­it­ies while at the same time being able to inter­act with AWS people, and these com­bined with the enter­tain­ment provided by AWS and Las Vegas it turned out to be a well-roun­ded exper­i­ence. Although the steep price may deter some people, I would still recom­mend it.