& Continuous Learning

AWS re:Invent is always an exciting time of year. For the past few years, Source Allies has sent a group of teammates for the annual event to come back and share all of the exciting things AWS is offering for the next year. We thought we would recap our experience from this year’s event!

Session Highlights

One of our favorite talks of the event was from Colm MacCarthaigh as he discussed how AWS manages the highly available services that we use on a daily basis. This talk really got us excited about making both scalable and durable applications.

Another favorite talk was from Adrian Cockcroft, who is vice president of cloud architecture strategy at AWS. His talk was about innovation at speed and the role that culture plays. At Source Allies, culture is a big part of what we do and it was great to see Adrian discuss his take on developing an intentional culture and the value he has seen as a result.

re:Invent Chalk Talks

An obvious favorite of re:Invent is the food and free swag. Outside of that, we enjoyed the Chalk Talks. This was a small group setting where you can collaborate with other cloud engineers, unlike the sessions where you are surrounded by 250 people. This allowed our team to discuss a variety of AWS topics related to our projects in various industries. Chalk Talks is a way to showcase the innovation that takes place within the AWS ecosystem.

Insider Tips

Looking back on the event as a whole, we’ve come up with a few tips to keep in mind for re:Invent 2020.

• Keynote Options - The keynotes can be packed so there are some options if you can’t attend. They typically publish the news releases for the new services prior to the talk, so you can be in the know. If you aren’t able to attend the keynote and decide to follow online, this might allow you to get into sessions announced during the keynote as you won’t be using the same internet as everyone in the room. You’ll also have an easier time getting into sessions happening at the same time as the keynote.
• Book reserved sessions in advance
• Check the schedule every night - If you’re still hoping to get into a session, be sure to check the schedule regularly. Each night people move their schedules around opening up room in sessions that were previously full.

Upcoming Services and Features

Re:Invent is always packed with tons of news about upcoming features and services, but we thought we would highlight a few that we were excited about.

• Serverless DBMS (Aurora) - While not a new service, we’re excited about the shift to serverless
• Ground Station - Lets you control satellite communications
• Addition of access points to s3
• Amazon Braket - Fully managed quantum computing service
• DocumentDB - Another service that isn’t new, but had a large focus at re:Invent

Resonating take-aways

Now that we are back home and have had time to reflect on re:Invent 2019, a couple of things have stuck with us that we wanted to share.

Separate storage from compute at scale The reason serverless works and is so successful. Write simple code Complexity eventually bites everyone (even Amazon rock stars). Every piece of code that you simplify is a part that won’t haunt you later.

We’re all looking forward to incorporating the new features and services covered at AWS re:Invent and can’t wait to see all that is to come in 2020 as an Advanced Consulting Partner!