The last time I was fortunate enough to attend AWS’s global conference, re:Invent, was three years ago in 2014. Then there were 14,000 delegates and the conference spanned just two Las Vegas hotels. Lambda was announced during Werner Vogels’ keynote and it seemed that the most in-demand sessions had “Docker” in the title.
In just three years the conference has tripled in size with 43,000 delegates attending this year spread across a campus of six Las Vegas hotels. Although not one of the biggest conferences held in Vegas, it’s obviously a significant logistical challenge. After some hiccups on the first day with the inter-venue shuttles and a venue running out of food, everything seemed to settle down and run smoothly from the start of the second day. Whether the improvement was due to human learnings of the hivemind or training of some Machine Learning algorithms is up for debate but almost certainly it was a combination of the two. No, actually, the transport still is not good and Uber is key to success.
I was lucky enough to be one of the 6,000 cloud geeks that descended on Vegas last week to attend AWS re:Invent 2012. This inaugural AWS developer conference was broken into 3 days. The first day was a bit of a warm-up day, with technical workshops and a AWS partner day. The two subsequent days had keynotes and deep-dive sessions covering all elements of the AWS ecosystem. In this post I'll cover what I saw during the three days I was there, and what had the biggest impact on me.