AWS Summit Mumbai 2019 Guide
What to expect and how to make best out of Summit week
Welcome to mini re:Invent of India. First thing first — AWS Summit Mumbai 2019 is huge! It has grown 2x of what it was in 2018. There are dozens of sessions and a workshop even before the main event which is on 15th May.
On Summit Day, there are going to be 8 theme based breakout tracks + 3 tracks for lightning talks + 3 tracks for tech talks + a bunch of sessions at builder fair and startup central all happening in parallel. There is no way you can attend them all.
If you haven’t attended one before all of this can be overwhelming and few might even get lost into what all is happening and where — I will try to break it down as simple as possible. Let’s start with what’s there before the Summit.
May 13th — Workshop
AWS DeepRacer Workshop
AWS DeepRacer Workshop will help you understand the fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning and build an autonomous driving model for an AWS DeepRacer. In this hands-on workshop, you will create, train, and refine your model on an online simulator and then load it into a genuine AWS DeepRacer for a spin around one of the test tracks at the AWS Summit on 15th May. So make sure to register for both the events for ultimate fun and learning!
Registration link for DeepRacer Workshop
Nasscom Tech Series (Invite Only)
Nasscom Tech Series (AI edition) powered by AWS is a free event for business leaders, data scientists, engineers, IT professionals, and developers to learn about machine learning services, and real-world use cases to build innovative AI-based solutions and bring new ideas to reality. Listen to speakers from Amazon US, Singapore and India share their perspectives on the direction in which AI is headed.
This exclusive event is invite only — please speak with your AWS Account Manager if you would like to learn more.
May 14th — Pre Summit Day
AWS Women in Tech Day (Women's Only Conference)
AWS Women in Tech session is a half-day conference aimed to inspire, educate and bring the women IT professionals together through technical discussions, demos and an opportunity to network with AWS experts. Learn about AWS and get up to speed on the hottest trends in Serverless, AI, ML and IOT, while also discussing the hands-on labs, training and other resources available to help take the next step and gain a deeper understanding of AWS.
All attendees will get a flat 20% discount on training offered by AWS Training and Certification, AISPL.
Registration link for AWS Women in Tech Day
AWS Innovation Day (Invite Only)
This evening event on 14th May is designed for business decision makers to learn from and network with AWS leadership and customers. An exclusive opportunity to engage with peers, exchange ideas, and gather insights to build your future ready business.
This exclusive event is invite only — please speak with your AWS Account Manager if you would like to learn more.
AWS Partner Summit
AWS Partner Summit Mumbai, an exclusive, full-day event where you can connect with AWS leaders, collaborate with industry peers and discover the latest in cloud innovation and AWS technologies to best serve your customers. Attend this forum to understand AWS’s business direction and how partners can be successful with AWS.
AWS Cloud Warrior (Invitation Only)
While most of you might not have heard of Cloud Warriors - this elite program aims is to bring together a group of recognized experts and trailblazing power users of AWS Cloud to share their experiences, learn from others and gain exclusive access to AWS resources. It is also a forum for most skilled customers to get more out of their AWS Cloud and become strong technology advocates.
May 15th — Summit Day (Main Event)
If you haven’t registered yet, do it now while the registrations are still open.
Pls note — there will be no spot / onsite registration so don’t wake up early unless you have a valid confirmation email. In case of queries reach out to aws-india-marketing@amazon.com
#ProTips — if you are attending for the first time
- Gates open at 7:30 am but early birds and ravens queue up from 6:45 and early. A lot of people travel overnight from other cities and reach directly at the venue around 6–6:30 so don’t expect to reach at 7:55 and get in by 8:00.
- Early bird freebies — The first 2000 delegates to reach the venue and complete their registration will receive an exclusive AWS bag as an early bird gift.
- Spend some time in meeting your peers and new folks. Get your questions answered from AWS experts during breakout sessions or at AWS booths.
- It is okay to miss a few sessions as they will be up on YouTube in a few weeks after the summit or similar content from other summits and re:Invent is already up on AWS channel.
- Sneak in an extra bag to carry swags, goodies and stickers :) do visit AWS booths and Expo.
- Make sure you at least have one active AWS certification to get an entry into AWS Certified Lounge.
- With 6000+ expected attendees, you will be standing in lunch lines for at least half an hour. Plan your sessions accordingly (see #4) or have a good brunch.
- Pick your session based on two things
- Service or a domain which you are currently facing challenges with and need help. This way you can connect with SMEs or some like-minded folks who can answer your queries.
- Service or a theme that interests you ie. either something that you want to switch to or grow your knowledge in a particular domain.
Meet the Builders Session — 8 AM to 9 AM
In this session, you will meet a panel of passionate builders at AWS. They will share what they are learning from our customers and talk about how they incorporate feedback into their day-to-day work to jointly build and evolve technology, and best serve the needs of our customers. The underlying theme of this panel is Learn and be Curious, exploring how we listen, understand, and learn from our customers, which ultimately leads to their and our own team success. Where?- International Lounge, Level 1 / Hall No 1.
Breakdown of all things happening on 15th May
Breakout Tracks (Green branches)
The breakout sessions will showcase best practices and demos designed to meet the needs of attendees whether you are new or have intermediate knowledge of the topics (level 100–300). This year the Breakout sessions will focus on eight key themes:
- Operate — EKS, EC2 Spot, VPC, Transit Gateway, Global Accelerator, Private Link
- AI / ML — SageMaker, Rekognition, Lex, Polly, Textract, Forecast, Personalize, Step Functions
- Analytics — Redshift, EMR, Athena, Glue, Kinesis
- Security — Config, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, VPC Flow Logs, GuardDuty, CloudHSM, KMS, IoT Device Defender
- Migration 1 — Migration Hub, Control Tower, VMware, SAP
- Migration 2 — DB Migration Services, Pro Serve, Landing Zone
- Media — Elemental, ThinxBox, MediaLive, MediaConnect, MediaTailor, CloudFront, WAF, Shield
- FSI
The mindmap above shows which track will cover what AWS services so it is easier to pick your area of interest and then plan which track or sessions you want to attend. In between breakout sessions, they will also have few AWS customers sharing their success stories related to the topic/service of the track.
To know more https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/mumbai/agenda/
Tech Talks (Yellow branches) — by AWS experts
Tech talks are deep technical talks, led by AWS solutions architects and engineers, featuring technical deep dives into our products/services with live demonstrations, customer examples, and Q&A with AWS experts. They begin with a 20-minute lecture, followed by a 5–10-minutes Q&A session with the audience.
https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/mumbai/activities/#tech-talks
Lightning Talks — by Customers
Lightning talks are a series of engaging talks from AWS customers and partners on innovating and disrupting their industries using AWS. These talks include information on projects they’re working on, share their experience from products/services they’ve used, and how they’ve leveraged AWS to ultimately drive their success. They begin with a 20-minute lecture delivered by AWS customers & partners, followed by a 5–10-minutes Q&A session with the audience.
https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/mumbai/activities/#lightning-talks
Sneak peek into stickers you can collect..
Developer Workshops (Invitation Only)
Containers on AWS Workshop
Attend this workshop to know about EKS cluster creation workflow, various monitoring and logging mechanisms, and new developments like AWS App Mesh’ integration with EKS.
Speaker: Pahud Hsieh, Specialist Solutions Architect
Date: Wednesday, 15 May 2019
Time: 11.15 am — 01.00 pm
Registration link: https://pages.awscloud.com/developer-workshop-reg.html (select Containers session)
Automating Business Insights
Attend this exclusive session to learn why more customers have adopted Amazon Redshift than any other cloud-native Data Warehouse, and how it enables them to build broader analytics capability with data lakes on AWS.
Speaker: Craig Stires, APAC Head of Data & Analytics
Date: Wednesday, 15 May 2019
Time: 3.00 pm — 4.30 pm
Registration link: https://pages.awscloud.com/developer-workshop-reg.html (select Analytics session)
These are invite-only events for a selected few audiences. Please register using the above link if you want to attend.
AWS Certification Lounge (only for AWS Certified folks)
This is one of my favourite places. Once you are tired and can no longer walk visit the AWS Certification Lounge to re:Charge (usually there is coffee and some cookies inside for you and charging points/cables for your phone). Last year there were Xbox, Kinect and Air Hockey tables as well. Along with a colleague, we were also the unofficial Air Hockey Champions last year.
You can also network with other certified professionals and collect your AWS Certified SWAGs (something similar to below).
To get into the lounge you must hold at least one active AWS certification. If you aren’t AWS certified you still have two weeks to earn your first certification if you want to be in that lounge and gets some of these swags :)
Meet AWS Community Heros and User Group Leaders
We will also have AWS Community Heros from India under one roof on 15th — feel free to reach out to Jeevan, Nilesh, Sathya and me (Gaurav).
User Group Leaders from 11 cities will also be present so it will be best to engage and get associated with your nearest AWS meetup group.
What’s next?
AWS User Groups
I lead AWS User Group, Mumbai along with Piyush and few other folks. If you are in Mumbai and let's connect at our next monthly meetup.
Not in Mumbai? No problem — we have AWS User Groups in 11 cities in India — do join the one nearest to you.
AWS Community Day 2019
AWS Community Days are community-organized cloud education events, featuring technical discussions and demos led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world.
Don’t miss attending AWS Community Day at following Indian cities this year. Registration for both Bengaluru and Chennai are now open.
