AWS Summit 2023 — Amsterdam
Is it worth going to it?
On the 1st of June, the AWS Summit took place in Amsterdam. As a Cloud enthusiast, I couldn’t miss this opportunity. Even though I’m not working with AWS in my current project, I always like to be updated, and those events are good for that.
Considering the event will take a whole business day, some questions always pop up in my mind:
- How can I make the most of it?
- And does it worth it?
Those questions are difficult to answer because they depend on personal aspects, but my experience attending the event might give you some insights about the answers.
Preparing before the event
This is always hard for me. In these kinds of events, at least five presentations happen simultaneously during the whole day. Always with exciting topics being presented concurrently. So you must choose the sessions in advance. Otherwise, you will get lost and miss something.
AWS provides an easy way to do it through the AWS Events App. You can see all sessions and their descriptions, select them, and then see them in a calendar.
Don’t forget to save time for networking and visiting the sponsor stands. This year I heard about some cool products, drove an F1 simulator, and joined a few sweepstakes that I, unfortunately, didn’t win.
Managing expectations
About queues
This is a huge free event with nice presentations, nice sponsors, free food, free coffee, and free beers at the end. So I needed to wait a bit in queues, and a colleague couldn’t join a session because it was already full.
About presentations
This is an event with short sessions and a broad audience. Don’t expect to get technically overwhelmed. Even for the sessions in the advanced category, they might not go as deep as you want. But it might be helpful to inspire or give some directions.
About sponsors
Sponsors will try to sell their services. So expect to be gently approached by them when you are looking at their stand or trying to do a fun activity. Believe me, this is not bad. It is an excellent opportunity to learn about new products, network, and get some insights.
The Keynote
The keynote presentation normally establishes the main theme for the event. Don’t expect to have technical stuff in this presentation. This year, if I can summarize the keynote in three terms, it would be Innovation, Data, and Artificial Intelligence.
After showing some good numbers about AWS in Europe, they presented how to use their services to promote innovation and some business cases. The Efteling, the most-known amusement park in The Netherlands, presented the one I liked most. They built a data lake, integrated it with some data models, and offered their clients the prediction of how long a queue to a ride would take.
Sessions
This year I struggled to choose the best sessions for me. Some of them were happening simultaneously, and unfortunately, I couldn’t split myself. I tried to have a balance between sessions that would deepen my knowledge and some that would bring me some inspiration or something new. Here is the list of the ones I joint:
How Booking.com uses CloudFront beyond just a CDN
This presentation was good, but I didn’t manage my expectations well. I have read articles about how they use CloudFront with A/B testing (like this one). Since this was an Advanced Session, I was expecting a dense presentation. But this didn’t happen because it was not the goal. Still, it was a good presentation about CloudFront usage.
Managing Lock-in in the Cloud: Analysis and Recommendations
I got positively surprised by this session. They brought good approaches to deciding whether you should Lock-in or not with some product, and if you choose to lock in, how to deal with it.
Developing an observability strategy
This presentation had excellent moments but also had its downs. They started with the basic observability concepts and then built the strategies on top of it. The way that they formalized the Outside-in and Inside-out approaches was really cool, but the business case they showed didn’t catch me.
Predicting waiting times of patients in hospitals with AWS
Well, this one I chose, expecting everything would be new for me. And I was right! It was nice to see how they integrated the Hospital systems with AWS, built their models on top of a DataLake, and created an API to return the predictions. It gave me an extensive list of things to look for!
Conclusion
I enjoyed my time at AWS Summit 2023 Amsterdam. This was definitely a good event for all IT professionals. Don’t bother if you are a developer or a platform engineer. Or if you are an expert or a beginner. You will find your way through the event.
I got updated with some news, learned new things, consolidated others, and had fun. I left the building feeling every minute was worth it. I can’t wait for the next one! See you there!
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