Three things I wish I knew before AWS re:Invent 2018
To stay up-to-date on the progress of Centrality’s ecosystem, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.
Site Reliability Engineer Brijesh Trivedi was part of a team of six from Centrality who attended AWS re:Invent 2018. He gives a run-down of the world’s biggest cloud computing conference.
Anyone who works with cloud knows that AWS re:Invent is the biggest conference of its kind in the world. This year, a team of six people from the Site Reliability Engineering team went to the conference in Las Vegas, joining more than 50,000 attendees from around the world. As a first-time attendee I found the experience overwhelming and thought I would share my experiences for those who might be lucky to have the opportunity to attend!
If you snooze, you lose
The schedule is absolutely packed with an incredible line-up of sessions - more than 2,000 in fact. A feature of the conference is that you’re able to reserve seats for the sessions a few days before the event so make sure you make the most of it! You need to be prepared (even if it means waking up at an ungodly hour). Here in New Zealand, the ‘go live’ time was 6AM and by the time I grabbed my tea and laptop, most of the sessions were booked out. Fortunately, after doing some research, I found out that there is a 75/25 policy in place, meaning only 75% of available seats can be booked online and the remaining 25% are reserved for walk-ins. Having gone through the frustrating reservation process, I think there should be a pre-event survey of the topics attendees are interested in and based on the results, a number of repeat sessions should be offered for the most popular topics.
There are limits to what you can (physically) take in
I love learning new things so it was hard to exercise restraint when choosing which sessions to attend. This brings me to my second mistake: keeping my schedule very tight and lining up sessions one after another. I had planned to attend 20 sessions or labs over the 5-day event. This was way too ambitious and I was exhausted at the end of each day, not from attending the sessions themselves but from walking to the different venues for each session. The hotels in Las Vegas are huge and spread across a considerable area. According to Google, it should have only been a 10 minute walk from The Venetian to The Mirage but in reality, it took me almost 25 minutes to get from one session to another. Clearly, that was not calculated correctly! One upside was that I was getting a lot of exercise — according to my fitbit, I was walking roughly about 11 kms a day.
Pair up with a work buddy
Some of you may not agree with this approach but if more than two people are going to re:Invent from the same company, I would highly recommend going to some sessions together. It will open up lot of healthy discussions with your peers about what solutions might work best for your company and those that simply won’t. From Centrality, six of us had the opportunity to attend re:Invent. This gave us a chance to do some team building with AWS Gameday, which ended up being my favourite event. Even though we were far from winning, the amount of stress we were able to handle from the set challenge was impressive. It helped us to understand what skills we are missing within the team and areas to improve on. The other event we all attended was the AWS Security JAM. For this event, we decided we would all split off and join teams at random. We thought this would also be a learning opportunity as each of us would have a unique experience to report back on. Completing the challenge was a lot of fun and our principle Site Reliability Engineer was in a team that managed to secure 2nd place! It was a proud moment for Centrality.
AWS re:Invent 2018 was an amazing experience and I’d definitely sign up for it again! Keep an eye out for my following posts on the new services announced at re:Invent and my thoughts on AWS blockchain-as-a-service.
To stay up-to-date on the progress of Centrality’s ecosystem, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.
