First time at AWS re:Invent

This past week, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. For those that don’t know, it is the premier conference for cloud computing and deals with the entire AWS ecosystem. Keynotes are presented by the CEO, Andy Jassy, and CTO, Werner Vogels. These speakers obviously have invaluable knowledge about their platform, and being able to see them talk first hand about computing and the power their services provide is inspirational to a relatively young developer like myself.

As a quick plug, one of the great things about PMG is the ability to pitch to go to conferences that will benefit the employee and company as a whole. Through this pitch process, I was able to attend the conference by the investment from PMG.

The largest realization I had from attending the conference is the depth and breadth of power in the AWS ecosystem. The number of services, features, and global scalability is astounding. I am a developer whose tools at PMG run entirely in the AWS cloud; but, I have only been in the industry for two years, so my knowledge of the AWS cloud was a little lacking. Since we had the tools set in place to allow for my development without having to get into the nitty gritty of creating instances or managing databases, I was not too familiar with the offerings of the cloud. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And the AWS cloud provides a lot to learn which is both daunting and exciting.

There are tracks for all skill levels and depths of knowledge for developers as a whole and for knowledge about individual offerings.

We do not spend enough on AWS. This does not translate strictly to more money – like bigger instances or horizontal scaling. This more so means that we do not take advantage of some of the many offerings, especially on the monitoring and automation fronts.

Using services like CloudWatch and Amazon Kinesis (here) could help monitoring and understanding our applications in real time.

The improvements that Amazon is able to achieve through Amazon Aurora is extremely cool. And its cool to see how exactly they achieved these improvements here.

Aurora is now PostgreSQL compatible.

It was very beneficial to attend the EC2 foundations session to finally lock down some of the core features and terminology from the compute offerings.

An Availability Zone has been this mysterious entity until attending this session – they are a set of one or more data centers within a region that are on different flood plans, power providers, etc. that are designed for failover within a region.

EC2 instances are the bread and butter of the AWS cloud – knowing the ins and outs of this service will highly benefit any developer.

Container management is a large ecosystem even outside of AWS. And with ECS, you can manage your cluster with all of the services and familiarity of the AWS cloud. This session provides wonderful insight into the whole environment.

Containers have been around for a while now, and I have a little experience with them from playing around in the past. And only one of our application currently is running on containers. This talk has reinvigorated me to play with containers more and push for more of our technology to run on them.

Overall, the amount of knowledge available at a global conference with over 40,000 attendees is astounding. When the designers and solution architects are giving the talks, helping you learn the platform, the learning increases by an order of magnitude. Additionally, just being there provides a new spark to want to learn and use the products in the AWS cloud. I would highly recommend to anyone who has the chance to attend in the future.