My first participation (just a few days ago) to the well known AWS re:Invent exposed me to a mix of feelings, memories, disappointments, ideas and hope. I used to work for AWS as TAM in Netherlands. For a brief period of time, unfortunately…
During the event in Las Vegas I got first a little sad that I am not part of this impressive and game-changing company anymore but no later than my first day in the conference I was reminded, accidentally, how much better it is to work with AWS cloud technologies rather than to work in AWS: I was at a table having lunch and, next to me, 2 AWS employees sat down with their lunch and discussed how nothing is clear, how it is frustrating to never know what you are actually expected to do, how the company pushes a lot on the individual and not giving too much support to deal with various things - nothing new to me. These were people that were partially in charge of this event.
Moving on, being an attendee only, I was trying to get to the most interesting sessions for me: Security related, DevOps and Infrastructure.
It was quite disappointing to see that first, of all the venues were too far apart from each other to be able to actually move between them and still be able to attend sessions. So I thought that I would follow specific “paths” (this was a very useful filter in the mobile app, by the way). That was not possible either. DevOps sessions, for example, were in both Aria and Venetian. overlapping too. You need at least 30 minutes to walk between Aria and Venetian.
The shuttle service they had included was really slow: the first day took me 35 minutes from MGM to Aria (15 of which we waited in the bus, 100m from the entrance, inside the underground garage at destination - there was not enough room for the bus to get to the parking space….). Then it took other 25 minutes to get from Aria to Venetian - the second stop. Of course, I missed my reserved session.
The only time I got through the above route in 14 + 12 minutes, respectively, was during Andy Jassy’s keynote - so this was not a Las Vegas traffic problem, was an AWS re:Invent induced problem. It also never got solved during the entire week!
I estimate that, due to:
- inefficient transportation
- overlapping sessions
- distributing sessions of the same Path to different venues
- not being able to reserve seats
- wasting time (hours) in line for walk-ups because we were told there are good chances to get in I probably missed at least 30% of the event.
So, a few other things to improve upon:
-
Dial down the “this is amazing” fluff from AWS representatives during Introductory (200) and even Advanced (300) sessions. Let the facts and use cases presented by others (Expedia, Netflix etc.) speak for themselves - much more powerful!
-
Make sure that everybody has the same chance of booking the sessions they want. After only minutes from online access, some of the sessions were already full… I think I know how :)
-
Waiting in line for walk-up sessions is complete chaos - please find a solution for this.
-
Make the “paths” (DevOps, Infrastructure, ML, etc.) easy to follow - no overlapping sessions that are not on the same topic, and definitely not in different venues!
-
The mobile app:
- doesn’t show your schedule if you are offline
- cannot find the connection if you oscillate from online to offline unless you restart it (at least on Android)
- doesn’t have a feature to share your schedule with somebody else
- doesn’t filter on time (for afternoon sessions I had to scroll a lot through the morning ones)
- doesn’t give you the “what session is starting in the next [minutes] in [venue] - this would have saved me lots of time and for sure would have helped to get more from this event.
Now on the good stuff:
-
The event, in general, was impressive, huge, massive, unnecessarily imposing… no sign of the Frugality LP you are many times hit with as an employee.
-
All of the sessions that I went to because I could not get into those that I wanted (more than half actually) were actually better than those of high demand. The How I Made My Motorbike Talk… for example, was one a lot more inspiring and interesting talks than the ones of much higher demand from AWS representatives.
-
It was definitely nice and reassuring to see that “Advanced DevOps” is very much in line with what I was doing and pushing for in several companies, most recently in Origin Group within Electronic Arts. I really wish some of my former colleagues in EA would watch these and understand that this is the way to go.
-
The Expo with all the vendors and partners in both Aria and Venetian was really good. Lots of good information, features, specific approaches to the same problems. Sometimes I got more valuable information from Expo than from some sessions.
Some generic thoughts:
- Serverless is (although was for quite some time now) the new thing - lots of interest in this concept and technology.
- DevOps is still needed, appreciated and slowly re-designed, re-invented, fine-tuned for various industries, including the slower ones (e.g. financial, government etc.).
- Security is omnipresent - I guess the old phrase “there is no cloud without security” still applies, even more, today.
- For some reason, many companies are betting their business model on exposing data from AWS accounts to the customer in a “better way”, or “easier”, or “more centralized”. I was never really in a position to need better or easier access to the data (logs, events etc.) I needed in the AWS accounts I was working with. Most of this is really processing CloudTrail and Billing data (a csv file that can be HUGE, in many cases).
Overall it was a very interesting week, with ups and downs, quite demanding but also rewarding!