AWS re:Invent — Going in with a plan
This is the second installment in our AWS re:Invent series. This is by Ben Libell, a cloud technology solution architect with Slalom Denver.
It’s well known that AWS is one of the largest and most prominent cloud providers available. With that, it should come as no surprise that re:Invent, Amazon’s yearly industry conference, is easily one of the largest cloud conferences in the world. It draws thousands of people to Las Vegas every year to facilitate learning, collaboration, and connection. Considering the vast size of this conference, it would be very easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle of the event and walk away with fantastic memories and new connections, but little knowledge actually gained. With that in mind, I’ve decided to approach re:Invent with a plan tailored to my personal professional development goals. My name is Benjamin Libell and I’m a Solution Architect with Slalom in Denver, Colorado and I’m happy to share my plan for getting the absolute most out of my first re:Invent conference with you.
Step 1: Know what you don’t know
The first step on my re:Invent journey involved picking my areas of concentration. AWS has an extremely broad set of offerings in the cloud, so just understanding where to begin can be a challenge. I’ve been working in AWS for the better part of two years, with much of my focus on cloud-hosted modern web apps. My personal areas of expertise land evenly between cloud development and cloud dev-ops. However, I don’t just want to expand upon my existing knowledge base at re:Invent — that sounds too easy, too expected. After all, one of the main benefits of this conference is the unique opportunity to interact with subject matter experts in a variety of specific fields, some of which are completely new to me. As I reviewed the schedule, I knew I wanted to take advantage of the broad skillsets represented and dive into these new areas during the event.
Step 2: Create a schedule with intention
Given my previous experience, I decided my first area of focus would be to expand my knowledge around cloud transitions at scale. More and more clients are asking not only for a transition to the cloud, but also for that transition to be able to scale and handle enterprise levels of traffic and utilization. It seemed a natural fit to dive deep into how different companies have handled their expanding user-bases in the cloud, and explore what challenges they met in their transition to cloud computing and storage as their primary platform. Given my interest in hearing the stories of those businesses who have tackled these problems firsthand, I chose mostly sessions or talks for this topic. This format lends itself to broad knowledge sharing over technology-specific instruction, which is what I’m seeking. Some of the talks I’ll be attending are ‘The serverless journey of shop.LEGO.com,’ ‘Migrating the live Pokémon database to Aurora PostgreSQL’, and ‘Accelerate migration to AWS with the right tools’. I chose these sessions because both Lego and Pokemon have huge user-bases and well-established brand recognition. Brands like these couldn’t do cloud “halfway” and I want to hear more about what their transitions were like. I’m hoping to learn exactly how these larger businesses made their transitions so that I can expand my understanding of the business challenges and advantages, and apply some of these findings to my own work.
My second area of focus is on Machine Learning. This has arisen as a hot topic amongst clients and technologists in the last year, but I don’t have much familiarity or technical knowledge in the space. As such, I want to really sink my teeth into this subject so that I’m not only prepared and educated, but also able to solution using ML when the opportunity presents itself. I specifically targeted workshops over talks for this area of interest, because I want to get hands-on with these new technologies to better understand how they operate and what they entail. Some of the relevant workshops I’ll be attending include ‘Get started with AWS DeepRacer’, ‘Deep learning with PyTorch’, and ‘How to build high-performance ML solutions at low cost, featuring Aramex’. My approach to choosing these workshops was to start basic and advance over the course of the week. I’m very excited to learn more about these technologies and, while I’m not familiar with any of them specifically, I hope I can build upon what I learn in each workshop to have a well-rounded understanding by Friday. Hopefully, I can get my hands dirty with the technology, so to speak, so that I’ll walk away with applicable real-world knowledge.
Step 3: Be flexible, and enjoy
If all goes as planned, my dual-pronged approach for re:Invent will help me achieve my goal of having a fulfilling and meaningful conference experience. I’m personally excited to attend and have the privilege to gain experience in areas I’m passionate about. But, I’ll be honest — whether my plan is a good one or not remains to be seen. I’ve been told re:Invent can be busy at its best and chaotic at its worst (what better way to describe a conference of nearly 50k in Las Vegas?), but nonetheless I’m looking forward to the experience and think going in with a plan will only benefit me in the long run! Stay tuned for my thoughts and learnings after I’ve been on the ground this week, and if you’re also here…I’ll see you in Vegas!
