Paylocity @ AWS Re:Invent 2023
At Paylocity, we are leveraging AWS to accelerate innovation and scale our services to meet the demands of our growing business. An important aspect of the cloud transformation journey is to ensure our engineering teams and leaders are informed of the latest trends and innovation in AWS technologies and can take advantage of the various offerings effectively.
This year, 20 of us from across our Technology org attended AWS re:Invent. The attendees mainly included technical leaders like principal engineers from various categories. We coordinated through a shared Slack channel to share tips & tricks to navigate the conference and to plan so that we could maximize our collective time at the conference by attending different sessions of interest and share the takeaways. We also had the opportunity to network and meet with some of the vendors we use and explore others tools and technologies for some of our technical challenges.
Paylocity is a remote first organization and this event was a great opportunity to get team members together in person — and we ensured to set aside some time to connect with our colleagues by way of team dinners and activities.
AWS re:Invent is a huge event, packed with various experiences, events and opportunities to get informed, network, and bring back learnings to the organization. This year’s attendees are already sharing learnings and takeaways with the teams across the organization in various ways — sharing notes, internal blog posts, conducting learning sessions and so on.
Paylocity invests heavily in growing talent, helping people upskill and build their careers. Opportunity to attend conferences, trainings, and workshops such as AWS re:Invent is just one such avenue. Our Product & Technology organization has a monthly Day of Gracious Learning (DOGL) — an entire day every month dedicated to learning and upskilling. The conference attendees are signing up to share knowledge via DOGL Sessions as well.
Here are some anecdotes and experiences from some attendees this year.
I really enjoyed the Chalk Talks, learning how other companies approached and solved some of the challenges we are facing. The speakers were great, several took time after the sessions to answer questions.
There were many sessions that spoke to our needs, Security, SQL Server Migration, Event Driven Architecture, Opensource database strategies, data lakes, and a deep focus on AI and Machine Learning. Outside of the conference we were able to connect with vendors and help influence their product roadmap.
The re:Play closing party was Epic, thanks to Major Lazer. — James
I enjoyed the breadth of content available for Data Engineering including topics on Eventing, Cost Optimization and Engineering Strategy. This year’s conference was all about Artificial Intelligence (AI). AWS announced a wide range of services or service enhancements that make AI much more accessible for everybody. The most exciting announcement for me is about Q — a new generative AI based assistant built right into the AWS suite. It promises to help debug setup issues on your AWS stack (how many hours have we spent collectively identifying networking issues as an example) or to upgrade your .NET software stack to the latest version of .NET enabling the migration of those stacks to Linux based containers. I am excited about the potential of making Data Engineer’s life easier.
I also enjoyed the breadth of hands-on sessions on any AWS service. I attended plenty of those including a session on MSK, a session about Spark on EKS, a session on Quicksight, a session on S3 Gateway and a session on Sagemaker Canvas. I love how easy it has become for a novice in Data Science to leverage various ML technologies seamlessly.
And there was plenty of opportunity to network and connect with peers in other companies and share experiences. The re:Play party was a blast! — Rene
I really appreciated the focus on Event Driven Design (EDA) and Domain Driven Design (DDD) across many of the session tracks. Especially helpful were the sessions where AWS customers detailed their journeys on how they refactored their applications from traditional monoliths into more manageable, cost effective, easily maintainable, and extensible architectures using EDA and DDD. It also was amazing to see the sheer number of attendees walking through the crowds and hotel lobbies with their re:Invent lanyards, making them easy to spot — 55,000 of us together at the same time is really quite a show! — Cameron
Attending the chalk talks and customer journey sessions was a great chance to learn how other companies have thought about similar problems, even if they’re from wildly different industries! We’re embedding personalized elements throughout Paylocity’s products so it was a lot of fun to talk to, for example, the director of personalization from Peloton about the recommendation architecture behind their suggested workouts feature & why it has evolved over time. Those conversations are a fun chance to step back from the systems that I’m immersed in day-to-day & help use another company’s experience to inform some of the options I’ll consider when making decisions with my team. — Sam
AWS Re:Invent was a great learning experience and we’re looking forward to sharing our experiences — and most importantly — start applying what we’ve learnt to accelerate our cloud journey. — Saloni
