AWS re:Invent — What I took away
This is the fifth installment in our AWS re:Invent series. This is by Ben Libell, a cloud technology solution architect with Slalom Denver.
AWS re:Invent is done. We’ve all spent our week in Las Vegas, come home, and had time to collect ourselves and our thoughts. I have to say my week in Vegas was both enlightening and enjoyable. With a conference as multifaceted as re:Invent, it’s hard to even begin to describe your own key takeaways. In addition to professional development benefits, I walked away with meaningful connections with co-workers who I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to interact with on the same level otherwise. Just getting to share meals with our group over the course of the trip was a great experience. Witnessing everyone’s reactions to trying spicy jellyfish during a particularly adventurous meal was definitely one of my personal highlights. However, re:Invent isn’t all meals with co-workers and cavorting from casino to casino; the sessions and workshops are the main reason many people attend each year, and it’s this aspect of the conference where we can start to look at things with a more critical lens.
Part 1: Getting “hands on” is harder than it sounds
Let’s be real — a conference with 100% valuable and engaging sessions, particularly one of re:Invent’s size, is a magical unicorn. There are bound to be some learning opportunities and areas for improvement. For me, these manifested as a few classes that were rough around the edges. On one hand, they were put together by passionate people who were clearly knowledgeable about their chosen topics. For many, the object of the workshop was interesting or novel, like building an Internet of Things (IoT) connected drink dispenser or a robot that will drive around a Lego track. While they sounded cool on paper, they were lackluster in reality.
I was looking forward to getting hands on with new and innovative technologies, but I found that most of these workshops had all the actual work for the thing you were building already finished when you walked in. The two-hour session then entailed pulling complete source code for the workshop, clicking a few buttons in the AWS console to host it, and seeing the pre-built thing working at the end. This approach does make sense; after all, much of the actual work for these topics can’t be completed in two hours. For example, writing the code necessary to pump water out of a bottle with a motor simply can’t be done in a two-hour time frame. Still, I walked away from these events appreciating that the result was cool, but also feeling as though I hadn’t learned anything immediately applicable. If I could make a change to this type of workshop, I’d dial in the scope so that participants could get their hands dirty and build something, even if the outcome was less impressive.
Part 2: Check your alignment
Unfortunately, not all the sessions I attended felt completely relevant to me as a technologist. At a conference with as many possible sessions as re:Invent, it’s often difficult to discern who the target audience of a particular talk is from the short blurb available when you register. Inevitably, I ended up attending a few sessions where the target audience was not a solution architect looking for expanded knowledge on new technologies. These sessions involved a bird’s eye view of a topic, combined with a quick testimonial. While the presenters in these talks were always knowledgeable, they typically stayed high level and rarely got into the weeds of the technology and its implementation. While valuable to some, these sessions missed the mark for my personal development goals. Finding 100% alignment of sessions to audience is impossible at a conference of this size, though making it easier to discern intended audience from the point of registration would help all attendees better plan their experience.
Part 3: The standouts
There were some sessions at re:Invent that were simply excellent — they stood above the rest and were informative experiences. These sessions had a case study format, with the company in question presenting their unique business problem and the detailed approach they took to leverage AWS to come to a solution. I think the practicality of these talks is what spoke to me most, and ultimately where they shone — they demonstrated real world examples of how AWS was used to solve tangible technology problems.
The first like this was done by the team behind shop.lego.com. In 2016, their ecommerce site suffered an outage during Black Friday due to the sheer volume of traffic they received. The presenters spent the hour talking about how they used AWS Lambda to solve their problem of scalability and demonstrated how to take that work further to create a fully serverless architecture. This was fascinating as serverless is something many businesses talk about, but few find relevant use-cases or implement properly. Seeing how Lego used serverless architecture to help their e-commerce platform with big spikes in traffic was an excellent case study in how to use this technology in a practical setting.
Another talk, presented by the Pokémon Company International, also illustrated how to tackle massive scale — even under a severe time crunch. When Pokémon Go! was launched, their internal teams grossly underestimated the uptick in users they would experience. To accommodate the increase from 2 to 50 million subscribers over the course of a year, they used a solution built via AWS Postgress Aurora. What was engaging about this talk was the description of Pokémon’s solution evolution over time. They showed how their initial implementation with AWS EC2 worked at first, but ultimately needed to change as their user base grew. It was a brilliant example of iterative architecture in the real world, and I found the progression of their solution compelling.
Wrapping up and looking forward
Overall, my experience at re:Invent was very positive. I had the opportunity to connect with a variety of different people from various backgrounds. From business leaders to data scientists, everyone brought an interesting perspective to the table, which I appreciated. I had the opportunity to learn how businesses solved difficult problems in the real world and walked away with knowledge of services I hadn’t had the chance to professionally interact with yet.
The most valuable thing I took away was what I learned in the sessions about solving business problems. They were extremely practical, and the presenters were often passionate about the topic as their experiences with the problems and technology were firsthand. When I’m planning my conference trip next year, I’ll seek out similar sessions. I’d love to hear more industry leaders share how they tackled their most difficult technical problems. Understanding how their teams identified the issue, worked through solutions, and tested tech to reach a positive conclusion is directly applicable to my work, and that makes it valuable. After all, if you’re going to bring 65k+ cloud champions and experts to Vegas to talk about innovation, enabling them to learn from one another (and facilitate the discovery of adventurous foods, of course) is the best approach you could take.
