Attended AWS Summit!
Published: August 24, 2022
On 8/18 a couple members of my team and I attended the AWS Summit! The AWS Summit is a totally free event hosted by AWS at the Anaheim Convention Center.
Our first stop was the Expo Hall to begin our mingling with various vendors. We saw lots of familiar faces and took part in some really neat demos from vendors like CloudFix, DataDog and VMware Cloud Health.
Next up, 10AM came around quick after walking around so we decided to head over to Hall C for the Key Note delivered by the Deepak Singh, Vice President, AWS.
The Key Note was actually very intriguing. Often when you attend a Key Note at one of these events, it is filled with sales speak and buzz words meant to rile you up. This Key Note was definitely a break from the norm filled with insightful anecdotes, allegories and a running theme: Never let a vendor or a product hold you back. Always be scaling, always be looking for growth and towards your future with any product you choose.
Deepak made an excellent reference to the design of the Space Shuttle. In short: The design of the Space Shuttle boosters was limited by the width of the transport roads designed for Roman warrior carriages hundreds of years ago.
He explained that the roads and the tunnels were built in accordance with the “two-horse” width of a warrior’s carriage and followed up with a quip that if Roman warriors had used four horses instead of two, the Space Shuttle’s boosters would have been twice as wide and offered even more takeoff power!
That had the audience cracking up but, the overarching message rang true. Your approach in choosing a platform should always be with the future in mind.
After the Key Note, which ran a little over time, we headed out to walk the grounds and take a break then back to the Expo Hall for more demos and exploring. We even had some free LinkedIn professional headshots taken at the CloudFix booth!
We attended several talks and found each incredibly valuable. Our first talk was regarding logging and observability. This talk was delivered by a DataDog rep and was solely focused on principals and not necessarily a sales demo for the DataDog platform. I took some excellent notes during this talk and will share my notes/takeaways and practical applications in another blog post, as this topic definitely deserves it’s own post.
Next up, we attended a talk given by a rep from New Relic. I’ve been test driving the New Relic platform this week and it has been really extensible. The talk offered even more key insights into logging and observability for your applications.
This talk spoke a lot about the OpenTelemetry Collector, a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help you analyze your software’s performance and behavior. I’ve been doing a bit of digging into OpenTelemetry as this was the first I’d heard of it. As always, the bottom line for a collector is how much does the collector effect performance? As of now, I’m unsure with regard to OpenTelemetry but, am open to continue to learn more!
Our last and final talk was a talk regarding Machine Learning and Deep Racer community races in AWS.
We were able to follow along as the speaker instructed on building a Deep Racer community race, as well as deploying your own ML Model. Only a few minutes in, I had already cloned the deep racer github repo and started building my own ML model. I also immediately removed the speed limiter. I AM SPEED!
To cap off the Expo we headed back over to the Expo hall, after ingesting SO much information and knowledge and having our brains fried, to mingle further with Vendors, see an illusionist show by SentinelOne.
The ?magician? took a volunteers phone, got into it and opened the calculator, had members of the audience enter numbers such as the value of their birthday and other personal details, added all the numbers up and a member of the audience was holding the phone in their hand, obscured from the watching eye of the illusionist so he could not tell what the final number was. He held a piece of paper with a value on it and slowly unraveled it to reveal he had predicted the value from the beginning. A classic.
And finally, we had some Servelesspresso!
Members of the AWS team built Lambda Functions to deliver your order from a web app accessible by QR Code straight to a Breville coffee and espresso machine and finally, your waiting hands. It was a neat experience and the coffee? Yummy!
Now..for the After Partay! Hosted by CloudFix, you received an invite from their booth to Puesto! for free Tacos and Margaritas!
They bought out the entire restaurant for the night, much to the chagrin of regular non-tech citizens coming to eat that night and seeing a long line of AWS Summit participants 😾LOL!
We have a Puesto down where I live in Irvine, California and we absolutely adore their tacos. I was definitely onboard with free Puesto tacos and Margaritas!
We sat, chatted, laughed and had a couple of Margaritas and..way too many tacos. I was bursting at the seams.
Overall, an absolutely wonderful experience. After winding down for the night, the team reflected on an excellent and productive day spent together exploring the AWS landscape. We had a follow up meeting the next week discussing our takeaways and what we thought of the experience and what our action items were on return to planet work.