AWS Re:Invent 2022

Each year since 2017, I attend the re:Invent, but this time I attended this amazing event as the CTO of Le Parisien. It was quite different from all the previous times. I had at heart to transmit what I felt my first time to my team. Although I was able to go there with only one member of my team because of some troubles such as visa, covid vaccin and even administrative & legal issues… Anyway I wanted us to be 4 and we ended up being only 2 😅 (why why me????). Nonetheless, these issues didn’t diminish my great excitement.

I wanted my colleague to realize the magnitude of the event and at the same time not to feel alone or lost. It’s very overwhelming to take conscience of all the possibilities with AWS and at the same time walking through these big structures as this event is really huge.

So we had some rituals, such as finding each other and having lunch together no matter what. Exchanging and choosing the interesting keynotes. Texting each other during the sessions so that we do not feel alone in this big environment.

In the past, after or even before the event, I used to take part in a team building before or after the event and this time with Johnny even if we were only two, we went on a trip with my former colleagues from MisterTemp. Johnny and I took some days off and it really allowed us to know each other. Thanks Johnny for your trust on the organisation of these days. I recommend everyone to have this kind of social bonding with you coworker : take the opportunity from a work event to have some quality time with your team by taking some days off if needed. We really enjoyed the time we spent during these days. So we went to Los Angeles, Death Valley and Sequoia Park.

Serious part now!

After these few days, we arrived in Las Vegas the 27th of november and the serious things were off to a flying start. Hey what did you expect ? 😁

I started my sessions on monday at 8h30 and before I had to get my precious sesame : my AWS badge without it I can’t attend the sessions.

Please find some KPI :

• I’ve attended exactly 15 sessions
• i’ve left about 2 sessions because they weren’t interesting
• I was late at 2 sessions
• I put in favorite 12 sessions in case my clone could attend theses sessions 😜. The truth is that I put them in case I could find a place or I could watch the repeat after the event.

Lets talk about the keynotes, there were 3 keynotes :

• The first one was with Adam Selipsky’s the CEO of AWS.
• the second one was focused Data by Swami Sivasubramanian the VP of data and ML (unfortunately I didn’t attend)
• the last one and the most amazing one was Werner Vogel’s keynote as usual. He puts in light the fact that “the world is asynchronous” so we have to think our architectures in this way, make thinks smaller, independent, event-driven, asynchronous and commutable. One of his simile is true : the honeycomb construction, if one of the cell is damaged the others are not impacted. We have to think our architecture in this way.

He announced SimSpace Weaver service which allows us to run a very large-scale spatial simulations at scale, without being limited by the computing and memory of the hardware, we don’t have to worry about the infrastructure behind anymore. It is a service for companies dealing with more the 1 million objects in a level of a city

In terme of announcements please find my takeaways :

OpenSearch serverless : is the major thing I keep in mind. We don’t have to to configure, manage, or scale OpenSearch clusters, the provisioning and the scaling could be a real nightmare sometimes

Lambda SnapStart is now available for Java only, and the cold start times up to 90% reduction in cold start latency. I do believe that i would be available soon for the other languages.

Aurora’s “zero-ETL” integration with Redshit

RDS Blue/Green Deployments

Application Composer : a kind of visual interface designer to build serlverless application, it is quite amazing and can really be helpful to have a full picture of our application

Sustainability : as everywhere it was a major topic, and AWS goal is to be 100% renewable energy by 2025 and being water positive by 2030.

One thing I want to notice is that the organisation of this event is super amazing. We were about 50000 attendees. We have plenty of people working for this event in order to help the attendees. Sometimes it seems annoying because we have a kind of “helper” every 10 centimeters for just to kindly remind us that we have to take this way or that way. 😆 But I really want to thank them all because they are doing an amazing job and they are really helpful in this huge maze of Casinos.