My company was gracious enough to send me to AWS re:Invent 2018 this year!
AWS re:Invent 2018 was a very fun experience. It stretched across several Las Vegas casinos, but I primarily made use of the Venetian. I stayed in Harrah’s which turned out to be very lucky since it was right next to the Venetian which I had to go to every day.
I primarily attended sessions, which included topics like containers, EKS, Fargate, Kubernetes, continuous delivery pipelines, serverless and the like. Overall, the sessions were really good with only a few that were just meh.
One thing that I enjoyed was going to all of the keynotes. They were really quite fun and they are in an amazingly huge room (several football field lengths) with giant screens stretched across an entire side. Compete with live music, cameras, fancy laser beam lights and, of course, smoke machines. Overall, there were four keynotes and each was distinctive and each released new AWS features which is pretty amazing.
Some of my favorite announcements:
- Firecracker
- EC2 A1 instances: just because it sounds like it is relatively cheap compute.
- Lambda as a Target for Application Load Balancer
- Lambda Layers
- DynamoDB Transactions and On-Demand
- App Mesh: could become a good alternative to Istio, but I do enjoy Istio already.
- Amazon API Gateway support for WebSocket APIs
All announcements can be found here, though the link will go stale at some point.
Have to hand it to the organizers of the event. I was worried about several things, like getting food, crowds, transportation and just getting around the venues. All worries were unfounded though, everything was really well done. You do have to come prepared though with a solid schedule, otherwise you could waste a lot of time. Some coworkers enjoyed the overflow rooms so you could stay in one spot and get it on most any session.
Would definitely do again!