Sydney AWS Summit 2017

Early in April I found myself at the Moore Park Entertainment district and more specifically at the Horden Pavilion for my first AWS Summit in Sydney. While I am Sydney born and bred the last summits I attended were in Berlin, Germany.

We started in the Horden with the KeyNote speakers giving us a rundown on what is going to be happening (It is strange in the Horden without a stage and a rock band up front). We of course heard from the famous Werner Vogels and others describing their AWS journeys here in Australia, I think for me the highlight was actually the pre KeyNote speech entertainment in the form of DJ Kanban! Still, these CEO’s/CTO’s and in general AWS staff got their rock star moment up on that stage.

The focus for me over the two days was to get some networking in, AWS Security and DDoS and IoT.

As I am an extremely technical person I of course kept away from any of the sessions that were under level 300 and kept with the 300/400+ sessions. The main key things I learnt were:

AWS Shield:

• Standard
• Advanced

AWS IoT and Machine Learning:

• Voice Recognition
• Voice Speech
• Image Recognition

Now AWS Shield is nothing new, I would like to think the concept of this product has been around since the beginning with AWS’s shared responsibility model in the mix. Why do I say that? Well I feel that AWS would have been protecting its infrastructure from as many types of attacks and DDoS as possible to protect itself, just as much as its customers.

The Advanced product on the other hand, while I feel it is a lot of money you do seem to get a lot for it. I like the pro active approach to monitoring and disabling attacks and communication with you. They did mention there are only two Shield Advanced call centers at the moment covering the world with more coming soon.

The second day we have another amazing KeyNote focusing more on the Machine Learning/IoT and Poly/Lex/Rekognition. We had some CEO’s from various companies showing their usage cases, etc.

I find these new products very interesting, really taking the hard work out of speech/image recognition and interaction and look forward in implementing some home IoT solutions with them!

So all in all, it was a nice introduction into some of the new products and ideas coming out of the AWS camp, but that is all it was.. An introduction. I found there were a lot of entry level talks and tracks on which for me was not so great, even the more ‘technical’ level 400 tracks were quite basic or just conversations about technical concepts but not actually getting their hands dirty. Considering this is my 2nd Summit but 1st in Sydney, the summit was really conservative but I suppose that is in line with Sydney businesses and companies. This is completely in contrast with my experience in Berlin, which was quite modern and having longer and more technical talks and tracks.

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