This year marks my first year attending re:Invent. It has been on my bucket list for a very long time and to have the opportunity to go with support from my AWS Partner – Cevo Australia leaves me incredibly grateful. A huge shoutout to my leadership team for supporting me and allowing me the chance to experience re:Invent in all its glory!
Best Intentions – Tough Reality
While I had every intention to attend sessions and do as much learning as possible, the sheer distance between venues, the booked-out sessions and need to queue exceedingly early for walkups meant the reality was vastly different. Given sessions were off the table I switched focus towards people. Conversing with strangers, hanging out at the Community Hub and meeting up with fellow AWS Ambassadors, AWS Community Builders and the inspiring AWS Heroes. I quickly learned that it is people at the heart of re:Invent.
The learning sessions I did attend were amazing, however it is equally as important to understand these can be watched at a later date when time permits. The in-person conversations, forging relationships and building branding for both my partner and my own personal brand are priceless and cannot be done retrospectively.
Day 1 - Monday
The scale of everything was incredible. It did not take long to realise the best laid plans were not going to fly here. I attended a couple of my planned sessions and talked about the Day 1 experience here in my Day 1 blog: https://cevo.com.au/post/insights-and-observations-from-reinvent-2024-day-1/
Day 2 - Tuesday
Finding my feet and learning how to get the most out of the experience. This was tough. Juggling and navigating the massive Expo floor, battling crowds and getting lost in my search for everything – it was a rough and long day. I wrote about the experience here in my Day 2 blog: https://cevo.com.au/post/insights-and-observations-from-reinvent-2024-day-2/
Day 3 - Wednesday
Spending time in the Community Hub and catching up on missed work, I met a lot of the AWS Heroes and fellow Community Builders. It offered the opportunity to give back by helping several people with AWS solutions during conversations. I tried unsuccessfully attending several sessions through walk up lines before returning to the Expo and engaging with several vendors. I was able to meetup with my former AWS Partner Solutions Architect who I had not seen in years. I picked up a bit of the token swag before finding the location of the AWS Partner Solutions booth for AWS Ambassador duties.
I was able to support my friend, fellow AWS Ambassador and AWS Brisbane User Group Leader, Alan Blockley, and the always entertaining, Mike Chambers, in a chalk talk on moving beyond chatbots for generative AI. Diving deep into Alan’s very own https://region-compare.com – Alan and Mike gave a fascinating insight into the use of generative AI to obtain and dynamically update services, AI models and more, comparing these features across regions. Both impressive and inspiring.
I finished the day attending the AWS Ambassadors dinner and getting the opportunity to meet and talk with Jeff Barr. Then it was off to Top Golf for the ANZ Welcome Mixer – massive day!
Day 4 – Thursday
I started the day attending Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote and it did not disappoint. The theme of “simplexity” with some amazing lessons taught by inspirational organisations such as “Too Good To Go”. Truly inspiring. More to come on a detailed write-up and lessons learned from Dr Werner Vogels Keynote. From team dynamics, leadership principles and even bicycle analogies – this keynote had it all and a very powerful message about simplification and the relationships to complexity. Simplexity.
By this point in the week, the exhaustion had really set in. I felt overstimulated, overwhelmed and my body was wrecked. I spent the day doing more expo floor walking, meeting with AWS product teams and gaining insight into some of the incredible new capabilities. The value of these conversations was second to none as I was asked to provide any feedback for improvements. Leaning on my recent experiences, I learned that the features I was seeking had not been previously requested.
I had the privilege of representing my AWS partner and the wider AWS Ambassador community at the Partner Solutions Booth and had some incredible conversations with other partners seeking advice from how to join the Ambassadors Program, through to funding requests. In addition, I was able to assist other Ambassadors in ways that I never considered (navigating Partner Central, competencies, foundational technical reviews and more). What was supposed to be a 30-minute shift turned into over 2 hours.
The day just got better from there as I attended the biggest festival I had ever seen – re:Play. It was such an amazing experience with major acts Weezer and Zedd performing such awesome performances. There was clearly no expense spared here with state of the art sound systems, lighting and frickin’ laser beams! Wow. Just wow!
Day 5 – Friday
Last day of re:Invent and I started my day at breakfast at Caesar’s Forum, sitting with some random people (really pushed myself out there to just go for it). As it turned out, the conversation quickly turned into a deep dive into identity management and security. Through extensive experience, I helped with the problem and taught advanced topics compressed into a single conversation. We discussed Service Control Policies (SCP’s), Control Tower, Identity Center, IAM policy evaluation, EKS Blueprints and the excellent EKS Teams plugin for simplifying EKS role-based access control, AWS Config, Security Hub, WAF, API Gateways, Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) and Account Factory for Terraform (AFT). Two hours later, we connected over LinkedIn and I was on my way back to pack for the return trip home.
Checkout is always awkward, so I checked out of the hotel just before 11 and left my bags with the porters (which you need to tip in cash – of course). I caught up with Alan and we headed into old Vegas at Fremont. Well worth the trip as they have maintained the old casinos and atmosphere is something you do not get from the current “strip”.
Summary
As a first-time attendee, I really felt overwhelmed with the crowds, the overstimulation, the physical distances travelled and the need to drive value back to my partner for sending me there at significant expense. It can feel like you need to constantly give back. As it turned out, I was able to give back a lot to the community. I represented my partner in many ways and some of that is intangible. What I left with was a wealth of knowledge to successfully survive re:Invent and learned coping mechanisms to deal with being overwhelmed. When you realise re:Invent is about people and you lean into that – you get way more out of it.
