AWS re: Invent 2018 - First Day Impressions

On Habré there are few publications about one of the most large-scale technology conferences. This is AWS re: Invent, which started today (November 26) in Las Vegas. It is understood that in the Russian-language space, the use of AWS may be somewhat limited. Nevertheless, Amazon AWS cloud technology leader determines where these cloud technologies are heading, and in 2018 this means where the technology is heading in general. Although the conference has some marketing glitter, against the background of the presentation of the next rectangular smartphones - this is a mega technical event. In general, technological innovations should not be very much this week. This article is a report on the atmosphere that I saw on the first day, so there will be impressions, grandmas, homeless people, food and almost no technology, I put in a couple of photos so that the text was boring.

What is re: Invent?

This is the main AWS technology conference. Lecturers: AWS team developers and managers, as well as partners using AWS. The conference takes place in Las Vegas. The main part consists of keynotes from especially noteworthy speakers (for example: CTO AWS - Werner Vogels).

Who pays for the banquet?

For me, the banquet is paid by my employer. The company Zocdoc, for which I have been working for 10 months, sent me as part of a landing force of 15 people. The ticket to the conference itself seemed to cost $ 1,500. Somewhere in the same amount will cost a ticket from New York and a hotel room. Well, all expenses on trifles, like Uber.
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Scale

The conference is very big! It is technically impossible to attend all the lectures. Even considering repetitions, even considering that not all lectures are directed at developers, even considering that half of the lectures are PR partners for PR. Lectures, trainings, practical classes are held simultaneously in 8 exhibition complexes (with hotels), each of which has many halls. The scale is such that from one complex to another can be reached in 10-30 minutes. Here you can see the campus layout.

I flew to the conference on Sunday morning flight and on the plane 75% of the passengers also flew to re: Invent. A similar situation was on all flights from New York on Sunday and Monday. Registration for the conference is open right at the Las Vegas airport. Picture to Kata - registration hall.

The city center is filled with people with conference badges. Coordinators help delegates at all major intersections, answer questions, direct people, dance to music that just plays outside in Vegas.

Speaking of music: various DJs play live every day on the main stage:

Organization

It is evident that the organizers tried. For example, the registration was completed by me in 10 minutes and without pain. To understand the size of a Tolstoyan organized a special fitting room. All participants carry e-cards - passes, which are scanned at a distance during the passage to events and can be scanned by a smartphone. Buses running between the sites work well. Food and drink.

But still there are enough organizational shoals. For example, buses expect unloading as much time as they spend on the road. The biggest pain comes from the official app, commissioned by Amazon, by a third-party company. The fact is that the program is so dense that it is very difficult to understand what you want and what you can visit. An application released specifically for the conference could help you figure it out and seemed to be intended for this, but it works very poorly. Even the conceived functionality (view the list of events for the day, add a lecture to the schedule, reserve a place at the event) is buggy and hardly works.

Technology

You can read about what is presented at the conference on the AWS blog . From what has already been presented: AWS Route 53 Resolver - new features in the DNS service for building hybrid networks. Firecracker which is already on the habr . Announced various new EC2 instances, including ARM based instances.

Food

Snacks everywhere: on boarding buses, at practical sessions, etc. Lunches are provided in the form of lunch boxes and also hot dishes that are served by waiters. The exhibition serves beer and various snacks, including mashed potatoes that are so expensive for the Russian heart. Lunchboxes:



A funny thing: walking from one hotel to another, he saw a bum who was eating an AWS lunchbox, he brought with him a beer Budweiser:

Exhibition

The exhibition is filled with various companies that provide various services for cloud software. There are all the most popular services, such as: DataDog, PagerDuty, Akamai, CloudHealth, Twilio. There are also software vendors that we all use: nginx, Redis Labs, Elastic, and many, many other companies. Service companies are trying to interest their products, if you can impose a deep technical conversation, then there are usually developers on the stands who can answer all your questions. Almost all companies distribute merch: stickers, hats, caps, t-shirts, socks, travel bags. For the time being, I only walked around half of the exhibition - I didn’t manage to run through all rows in two hours. Interestingly, usually, to get a merch, you need to scan a badge with a smartphone. Thus, your email is transmitted to the company that scans the badge.



Write in the comments, if you want me to write about something in more detail - I will keep it in mind when drawing up my personal program and writing future notes.