Participant report of AWS re:Invent 2018

Fenrir Inc. gives engineers the opportunity to attend the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference every year since 2016.
For re:Invent 2018, two of us that work in infrastructure, Shibata and Kimura, were able to attend.
This time I will tell you about the impressions I had while attending re:Invent 2018!

※ This article is a modified version of the content posted in Wantedly
https://www.wantedly.com/companies/fenrir/post_articles/147182

What is re:Invent?

re:Invent is a conference held annually where AWS users and partners from all around the world can gather together.
This conference, which is in its seventh iteration, has become bigger and bigger every year. This year in particular it was a large-scale conference attended by more than 50,000 participants with a venue spanning across seven hotels in Las Vegas.

I was overwhelmed by the scale of the venue!

First, the registration.
I got my attendee’s tag and other novelties (a hoodie and a bottle) at the registration area.

After that I headed to participate in the sessions and workshops but I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the scale of the venue.

I think that attending sessions and workshops using a shuttle bus to move between venues and sometimes getting lost inside the venue itself is something that can’t be experienced at a conference in Japan.

Many sessions, new discoveries

There were many sessions split across three levels of difficulty, from basic talks introducing AWS services and use cases, to talks about trends in the industry and how to better engage with AWS.

In the sessions that introduced the AWS services, not only an overview of the existing functions was presented. Updated content announced just before re:Invent as well as new capabilities introduced the same day were talked about so that even experts attending the introductory sessions could discover new things.

The workshops were hands-on events to actually learn by using the AWS
services themselves. We could learn about the existing services through our own direct experience, and also had the opportunity to use new devices announced annually before anyone else.

In recent years, re:Invent has been used to announce new devices that use the technology trending that year. For example, Amazon Echo using speech recognition technology was announced two years ago while DeepLens using deep learning was announced just last year.

This year’s announcement consisted of a device named DeepRacer which uses a machine learning technology called reinforcement learning.
This device is a toy car equipped with a camera which can be used to learn automatic driving using reinforcement learning while actually driving the car.

At the same time, an autonomous racing league using DeepRacer was also announced and held for the very first time at this year’s AWS re:Invent. DeepRacer’s workshop was filled with applicants who wanted to join from the excitement of the new product and league announcements. This league is scheduled to be held again in next year’s re: Invent, so I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of race it will become next year!

Interact with other AWS users

Users from all around the world attend the AWS re:Invent conference, so it’s the perfect opportunity to interact with all sorts of people.

At the Expo, many companies providing services related to AWS have booths promoting their products. At their booths, I could get various novelties while listening to what they were offering.

There was also a booth of AWS user groups in where different members from various countries were standing at different times.

Marcelo from the São Paulo user group tweeted a picture taken along Gary from the St. Louis user group and me.

Only those who have the AWS certification could access the “AWS Certification Lounge” where exclusive drinks, sweets, and novelties were being distributed as well.

At Japan Night, we were able to interact with other people from Japan.
We talked in Japanese about many things such as issues we are currently having, as well as about sessions that we enjoyed, among other things.
(I was very happy to be able to talk in Japanese.)

The main venue had walls that we could freely graffiti.
It was a good chance to appeal Fenrir to the whole world, so we drew the logo mark almost every day!

Finally

Fenrir gives us the opportunity to attend re:Invent every year to learn.

AWS re:Invent’s keynotes and sessions are public on YouTube, so anyone can watch them at home, but the incredible experience we had wouldn’t have been possible without actually having participated.

I would like to attend re:invent next year and enjoying it as much as possible. For that I think I will work hard on improving my English.