It was my first re:Invent in person. Was it worth to go? This short text should answer to it :)

It is the major event in Cloud world. Organized by AWS, obviously. This year we had 13th edition of the event. 5 days in Las Vegas, fully packed with presentations, workshops, networking and expo. Re:Invent is also the place, where a lot of announcements happen. But in fact, AWS is announcing new products, updates, changes etc for a whole month before the event.

A few numbers

Thanks to work done by Wojtek Gawronski, Developer Advocate at AWS, who prepared this data, I can share a few numbers about the conference. These numbers can give you the glimpse about the scale. And scale is enormous.

60000 people joined the event in Las Vegas. It is a lot of people, right? Yes, you can feel the number of people. But imagine 5 big hotels in Las Vegas. There is a lot of space to accomodate this crowd!

3500 speakers and 1000 sessions (talks, panels and workshops). Believe me, it is hard and almost impossible to choose something for yourself. So many good sessions happens in the same time!

But there is a catch. This year we could experience how the hype works. I think more than 30% of sessions had “AI” in the title. The reality is simple. AI is a hype. However, I have a feeling that many of sessions had AI in the title for one reason - to have more chances to be selected into the conference. The main topics were hidden behind AI. I will explain this thesis deeper in the video on my channel soon.

Announcements

During the re:Invent we heard 123 announcements about new services, changes, updates, new functionaalities. In total, together with all announcements before and during the event we heard 545 announcements.

My top 10

• In this first summary done by me I selected 10 announcements which I found most interesting
• Aurora DSQL. Serverless distributed PostgreSQL compatible database. We can create distributed, multi-region, active-active database. Imagine the possibilities! I had the opportunity to work with DSQL during the workshops, and I have to say, it is really promissing
• CloudWatch Database Insights. Together with other Insights services, we can monitor and analyze more deep data from databases.
• S3 Tables. New type of S3 bucket which allows to store data in Apache Iceberg format.
• Predictive scaling for ECS. Your infrastructure can scale proactively, based on ML learning and anticipating the changes in the workload
• EKS Auto Mode. If you are not very familiar with AWS and / or Kubernetes, EKS Auto Mode helps you to easily provision cluster with all resources needed, like databases, storages, etc.
• Elastic VMWare Service (EVS). With latest changes in licensing and purchasing options of VMWare, this solution helps client to migrate the workload from on-prem to AWS
• Trainium2 (Trn2). New CPU produced by Amazon subsidiary - Annapurnalabs. This CPU is designed to provide better capabilities for ML learning, but also inference.
• Ultraservers. Now you can build a huge cluster of 64 Trn2 CPUs. With internal Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), you can create a rack-wide cluster of servers with very fast internal network what is a huge advancement for machine learning processes.
• Nova models in Bedrock. 4 text models (3 are available already), one for video and one for images. AWS claims these are the most multi-modal models, to the point where we talk about any-to-any.
• Bedrock Marketplace. From now we are not limited to a few models given to us by AWS, but actually vendors can place their models in the marketplace and clients can easily start to use them with Amazon Bedrock.

I had some troubles to complete this list. There was so many great announcement! Maybe I'll write more about them, maybe in more detail way. Are you interested? Let me know in the comments!

More numbers

80 kilometers. This is the distance my watch measured during the event. It is a lot of walking! Re:Invent is truly the walkathon, not just a conference :)

3 Keynotes watched live

2 workshops. I attended two workshops (once without laptop :) But thanks to Johannes Koch, I was able to actively participate :) )

4 sessions attended. Someone can say here “what? Only 4?” Maybe. But consider this - the conference is not only sbout presentations. It is about networking, for mer, mainly about networking.

1 customer review session attended.

Not measured number of booths visited :)

A lot of people met, a lot of discussions and a lot of ideas for more videos.

2 re:Caps already planned. Re:Cap is an event where experts share their views on the conference, announcements etc. As for today, I participated as speaker in one event in Gdansk, we have another in Warsaw tomorrow. Quite possibly, this number will grow.

Flights rebooked 4 times. Yeah, my trip to Vegas wasn't easy. My trip there took almost 40 hours. I will record a video about it. And I am thinking about the title. It will be re:Mess, or re:Crap, I will see :D To be clear - it doesn't have anything wit the re:Invent itself!

Wrap up

It was a great event. My first, as I said, hopefully not last. Stay tuned for videos and potentially more posts about re:Invent!