AWS re:Invent 2021 reCap

Dec 3, 2021 14:53 · 1055 words · 5 minute read

After almost two years of COVID, work from home, and not seeing any technical person outside my company it was finally time again to hit the road to Las Vegas to learn and exchange about the latest innovations AWS has to offer.

Annoucements

AWS is positioning itself even closer to it’s customers and catch them where they are: In AWS, traditional datacenters, at the Edge (Wavelength and Local Zones) and even in Space (GroundStation). This years re:Invent reaffirmed that through announcements like Private 5G zones , two new Outposts sizes as well as the addition of more than 30 Local Zones to more continents.

Sustainability mainfests itself as one of the core advantages of using AWS over traditional datacenters. This became evident when Werner Vogels presented the Sixth pillar of the Well-Architected Framework. During the Keynote, Werner specifically mentioned Rust as a programming language that is very resource efficient and thus can help companies to reduce their carbon footprint. Sustainability was indeed a subject that I discussed with several participants along various workshops, so at least from my very limited focus group I can confirm that this becomes a real concern in the Cloud community.

The speed with which ARM architectures are replacing x86 is facinating. Fitting to that are the annoucements of AWS to support Mac M1 instances as well as the preview of Graviton3 instances.

The rest of the annoucements are also important, but rather closing gaps which were required by customers. My personal choice of these annoucements would be:

As I’m not professionally involved in AI/ML or IoT, I can’t really judge the impact of the annoucements made, but I’m sure they are really important for the folks concerned :-)

You can read all the annoucements directly on AWS' dedicated blog post or in zoph.io’s excellent GitHub repository.

As TechCruch wrote, this years re:Invent was “more incremental than disruptive”, which reminded me of this excellent talk of Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation.

I don’t necessarily think that incremental innovation is per se bad, but it’s true that the big wow annoucement this year was missing. However, this years annoucements certainly help us in the cloud world to do our jobs more efficiently and save resources on top of that. AWS is and will stay the leader of Gardners Magic Quadrant for the foreseeable future and I’m confident that once the COVID dust settles, we’ll have some big wow annoucements in the years to come!

My experience

This years re:Invent was covid-related way smaller than previous years. Depending on who you talked to, the number of participants was ranging somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000, which is about 1/3 of previous years.

The keynotes were in the usual Venetian hall and I haven’t had the feeling that there were less visitors than in the previous years.

Contrary to 2019, the venues were much closer together, offering walkways between the Venetian, the Wynn and the Ceasars forum. That led to an average of 18k steps per day for me, but who thought that re:Invent wasn’t only a learning but also an exercising conference.

Personally, I didn’t do breakout sessions but only workshops, chalk talks and one gameday. AWS did a huge job in aligning the way workshops are presented and they offered a great learning experience. The advantage of doing the workshops at the event is that AWS is offering pre-created accounts, as some of the labs can be quite costly (the clear winner here was the FSX Performance workshop which would have incurred $4,000 over two hours). AWS is also publishing their workshops on the following website: https://workshops.aws

Among the workshops I participated were such as:

  • Serverless SaaS Deep-Dive where we discussed the challenges of building multi-tenancy applications with Lambda and API Gateway
    • I discovered through this the AWS SaaS Factory, which helps customers to assess and build SaaS solutions on AWS
  • I also participated to a container-based EKS SaaS solution workshop, presented by the same SaaS Factory program
  • I got my hands on the AWS Fault Injector, AWS' managed chaos engineering platform
  • I built dashboards with QuickSight, S3 and AWS Glue and saw how easily it is to make those available for stakeholders
  • I got to know the AWS Transformation Guide, a not yet released service that accesses an organizations maturity with regards to their digital transformation, providing related AWS services and best practices to optimize an organizations cloud adoption
  • I also worked with Wavelength and Local Zones to build low-latency applications with EC2 and EKS. This really helped me to understand better what Wavelength and Local Zones were about
  • And some more workshops about Cloud Compliance, Observability and Serverless Security

For sure, typical for re:Invent, there wasn’t only a lot of learning, but also a lot of fun. Beginning with Midnight Madness on Sunday night, followed by vendor receptions Monday through Wednesday and the grande finale re:Play, this year with world-famous DJ Zedd.

The COVID situation

All participants were required to be fully vaccinated and wear masks all the time except for eating and drinking. This was very strictly followed by the participants, which at least made it feel subjectively safe. During the vendor events however, things were handled a bit more relaxed, which was fine for me too. This allowed people that were open to take the risk of the events to not infect others that preferred to just attend the conference.

For sure, there was an inherent risk with so many people gathering at a conference and especially during the vendor events and re:Play. But as everyone had to be fully vaccinated (most people I talked to had already gotten their booster shot, including me), it felt fairly safe, even though unusual after all this time.

To conclude, I have to admit that it felt amazingly good to be among my 20,000 closest friends and get a glimpse back to a normal life.