AWS re:Invent — Fast Pass to Unannounced Sessions

Be the first to know about newly added sessions

AWS re:Invent is less than a month away and it’s time to prepare. Certainly an important and exciting part of re:Invent is the flurry of announcements that they sequester until the conference. Of course, a keynote announcement is just a brief summary. To really understand a new service, you’ll want to take a deeper dive. To help with this, AWS dynamically adds sessions to the catalog during the conference. Since they want to keep the existence of these new services secret until the keynotes, they can’t publish these sessions any sooner. Unfortunately, if you want to get into one of these sessions, you need to beat the rush of your 60,000 equally curious fellow attendees.

Sample SMS alert — And a talk by yours truly!

To give Cloud Pegboard users an edge, we’ve created a real-time notification service that will send you an SMS text message and/or email immediately upon our detection of any additions to the catalog. With this rapid heads-up, you’ll be more likely to be able to reserve a seat in a newly added session before it fills up.

Beyond just sessions related to new services, AWS continues to add sessions nearly daily at random times. Therefore, even in the run up to re:Invent, by being alerted to new sessions, Cloud Pegboard users are able to learn about and sign up for new sessions before the masses swarm in and fill all the seats — which happens surprisingly fast.

Another class of dynamically added sessions are additional repeats for popular sessions. These are sometimes added before the first day as well as during the conference. Therefore, by watching the notifications, you may get lucky and find a new repeat for a session that you couldn’t get into on your first attempt.

Existing Cloud Pegboard users can enable real-time updates by simply checking the box in their profile. New users can enable notifications on the new user registration form.

Catalog growth revealed

A key feature of Cloud Pegboard’s “super session catalog” is that it tracks the date that a session is added. This makes it possible to sort by date and review the additions since you last mined for sessions to attend. This is also how we are able to provide our users with daily and weekly addition digests (in addition to the real-time alerts).

Having the addition date also allows us to shed some light on when sessions are added. Even though one might assume that when AWS released the catalog in August it might be largely fleshed out, as you can see below (figure 1), there is linear growth and the current catalog is 4 times larger than when was first released. That is, 75% of the sessions come from growth and weren’t in the initial version of the catalog.

Figure 1. Session growth since catalog was first released in August

To make it easier to appreciate the daily additions, figure 2 removes the cumulative total as well as the first sample point for the initial 671 sessions. Here you can now clearly see the amount of daily activity there is for sessions in the run-up to the opening of seating reservations on October 15.

Figure 2. Daily additions after initial release

Again, while one might think that there would not be any significant additions after reserved seating opened until the conference, figure 3 shows that there is a steady rhythm of daily additions, and a significant number in the last four days.

Figure 3. Daily additions after registration opened until 11/4/2019, date of this post.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next four weeks, but it would seem that it’s likely that AWS will continue to add sessions until the conference starts, and then certainly they will add a material number during the conference too.

As we are now poised to easily surpass 2800 sessions, all I can say is…

We’re gonna need a bigger venue

You might also be interested in Surviving the AWS re:Invent catalog and Virtual AWS re:Invent 2019.

About Cloud Pegboard

Cloud Pegboard helps AWS practitioners be highly effective and efficient even in the face of the tremendous complexity and rate of change of AWS services. We want to keep AWS fun and feel more like dancing in a sprinkler on a hot summer day and less like being blasted with a firehose. We make the AWS information you need amazingly easy to access, and with personalization features, we help you stay up to date on the AWS services and capabilities that are important to you and your specific projects.