tl;dr

If I had to pick one word to describe AWS re:Invent 2017, it would be “popular”. There were over 43 000 attendees this year. The conference organizers and staff did an amazing job rising to the challenge, keeping folks corralled and working hard to manage expectations. I had a fun time; it was great to meet up with old friends, make a few new ones, and learn stuff at the same time.

Sessions had about 75% reserved seating and about 25% of the seats available for walk-ups, but with so many folks at the conference, popular sessions had a lot of waiting in line and a lot of unhappy faces on the people who didn’t make it in.

The conference was spread over a massive campus: 6 properties from the MGM at one end to the Venetian at the other; a good 30-minute hike if you’re fast and don’t get lost or caught in construction. Shuttles were available, but lines were long and people reported transit times of 60–90 minutes, so other than an early-morning trip on Monday, I just walked. A lot. I put in just over 60km during the week and am very happy to have had good shoes.

There were lots of interesting breakout sessions, chalk talks, and workshops; reports are favourable on the jams and hackathons. Based on this year, if I get to go again I’m going to try to go to chalk talks exclusively and fill in remaining time with a hackathon and a jam or two. The sessions are great, but they’re recorded and you can watch them in your copious spare time once you get home.

General activities

Registration

Registration opened just before 1pm on Sunday and was incredibly efficient. There were tons of folks available to hand out badges, and they had a separate section for people to try on this year’s hoodie before heading over to pick up their size, which eliminated a bottleneck from last year. I was in and out in single-digit minutes.

Sadly, I lost my hoodie in the crush of the crowd on Monday and had to use last year’s instead. Life is pain.

Midnight Madness

Modeled after an NCAA basketball tradition, AWS had a big party and then hit the court at midnight exactly with a new service annoucement: Amazon Sumerian, a 3D, VR, and AR service that lets folks create interactive environments. So far environments are single-user, but it’s not hard to see multi-user coming. There will be a marketplace for folks to create and sell 3D models that anyone can use in their environments, and there’s already support for chatbot actors called Hosts that can interact with users.

At 1am, Amazon announced support for AWS Elemental, a full suite of media services targeting folks who broadcast live and pre-recorded video.

This is the last time I’m going to mention new releases; you can get a full list from the AWS product announcements page. Be prepared to scroll.

Welcome Reception

The expo hall opened at 5pm Tuesday for the usual welcome reception; it had been open for most of the day but the reception added food and drinks. It’s very popular and there’s always a mad rush for swag. I had some good chats with vendors and the very smart folks in the AWS section, including the Education folks hidden away in the back corner. The most interesting thing I took away was that AWS has a program for high-school and college students that students can sign up for themselves or with a teacher’s help and learn all kinds of stuff about the cloud, with tons of content and credits available.

Sadly, I wasn’t able to say the right things to the Yubico folks to snag a free key. I want to get a 4 so that I can experiment with U2F, and I doubt they were handing those out.

Tuesday Night Live with Peter DeSantis (video)

This was a very interesting update on the vast networking infrastructure that AWS has around the world, and segued into a description of the incredible work they’ve done in compute.

The most inspiring part of the evening, though, was the Autodesk presenter talking about how advances in compute have enabled entirely new ways of working for their customers and how that’s going to help the world be a better place for the 10 billion people that will soon be here.

Wednesday Keynote with Andy Jassy (video)

This keynote came with a lot of mind-bubbling announcements, but I promised not to list them. It was a fun time and clearly Andy Jassy was excited to share the news with the world.

Thursday Keynote with Werner Vogels (video)

Werner Vogels’ keynote was more retrospective. I didn’t hike over to the MGM to watch the show and elected to stay in a remote viewing room. I think this was a mistake as I missed out on the energy and wasn’t as engaged.

re:Play

I’m not a big party person, so I just picked up a T-shirt for the folks at home and toured around the megastructures. Yes, megastructures — if you’re going to put on a party for 43 000 people, you need space. There were 3 huge tents and tons of activities, from video games to mini-golf to archery tag to dodgeball to a ball pit and many more, all set to the soothing tones of Team Ezy, Jen Lasher, and DJ Snake.

Breakout sessions and workshops (AWS video catalog)

I’m just going to dump in the list of sessions that I wanted to go to for future reference; there will be some sparse commentary for the ones that I actually made it to. There were over 1300 breakout sessions spread out over the five properties, so there was really no way to cover even a noticeable fraction of the ones I wanted to see.

Community Day

DVC202 — The Open Guide to AWS: A GitHub-Based Resource for Practitioners

The Open Guide to AWS is an open source writing project, which over the past year has become one of the most popular AWS resources on the web. It’s both a written resource on…

DVC302 — And You Thought You Knew Amazon EC2

When is the last time you explored the nooks and crannies of Amazon EC2? While you weren’t looking, AWS leveled it up with more features and capabilities than you can shake a…

DVC304 — Compliance and Top Security Threats in the Cloud — Are You Protected?

Compliance is necessary and a good thing. However, many compliant companies are still getting breached. In this talk, we discuss the importance of using a risk model to…

Enterprise

ENT346 — How AWS Runs Our Weekly Operations Meetings (Chalk Talk)

For more than 10 years, AWS has held a weekly meeting to review the operational performance of our services, identify new best practices, and share lessons learned from the…

IoT

IOT311 — Customer Stories of Things, Cloud, and Analytics on AWS

In this session, AWS IoT customers talk about the nuances, successes, and challenges of running large-scale IoT deployments on AWS. Hear from customers who have been…

I stumbled into this talk accidentally; I was waiting for a friend who was going to the session, so decided to wait in the walk-up line and ended up going in. The talk was a great discussion of how iRobot does IoT, I really enjoyed seeing the details and challenges that they encountered.

Containers

CON201 — Containers on AWS — State of the Union

Just over four years after the first public release of Docker, and three years to the day after the launch of Amazon EC2 Container Service, the use of containers has surged…

This was an interesting outline of what’s come out and what’s coming soon for containers in AWS. Container product manager Deepak Singh hinted that AWS Fargate, the new container cluster service, was only a step towards what they really want to do, which is allow customers to run containers without worrying at all about the servers that they’re running on.

CON213 — Hands-on Deployment of Kubernetes on AWS (Workshop)

In this workshop, attendees get hands-on experience using Kubernetes and Kops (Kubernetes Operations), as described in our recent blog. Attendees learn how to provision a…

CON302 — Building a CI/CD Pipeline for Containers on Amazon ECS

Containers can make it easier to scale applications in the cloud, but how do you set up your CI/CD workflow to automatically test and deploy code to containerized apps? In…

CON402 — Advanced Patterns in Microservices Implementation with Amazon ECS

Scaling a microservice-based infrastructure can be challenging in terms of both technical implementation and developer workflow. In this talk, AWS Solutions Architect Pierre…

Media

MAE401 — Designing for Disney/Marvel Studio-Grade Security (video)

Security is paramount for media storage and workloads and can directly impact a studio’s bottom line. As core media workloads move to the cloud, it’s imperative to examine…

Content Distribution

CTD301 — Amazon CloudFront Flash Talks: Best Practices on Configuring, Securing, Customizing, and Monitoring Your Distribution. (video)

In this series of technical flash talks, learn directly from Amazon CloudFront engineers about best practices on security, caching, measuring performance using Real User…

CTD401 — Taking DevOps Closer to the AWS Edge

Since last year’s ‘Taking DevOps to the Edge’, and with the introduction of AWS Lambda@Edge, the tools available to apply DevOps practices to your application edge have…

Serverless

SRV213 — Thirty Serverless Architectures in 30 Minutes (Chalk Talk)

Don’t blink because in this session, we quickly show you thirty different architectural patterns that you can use with AWS Lambda to solve everything from basic…

This talk was insanely popular. There were multiple repeats and I didn’t make any of them, but I really wanted to. Maybe there’s a recorded version of this talk somewhere out there? 爛

SRV301 — Optimizing Serverless Application Data Tiers with Amazon DynamoDB

As a fully managed database service, Amazon DynamoDB is a natural fit for serverless architectures. In this session, we dive deep into why and how to use DynamoDB in…

This was a cool session that covered (among other things) how to solve a couple of use cases that I’ve always struggled with, so I walked out a more-informed person.

SRV302 — Building CI/CD Pipelines for Serverless Applications (video)

Building and deploying serverless applications introduces new challenges for developers whose development workflows are optimized for traditional VM-based applications. In…

SRV305 — What’s New in Serverless (video)

Join us to learn what’s new in serverless computing and AWS Lambda. Dr. Tim Wagner, General Manager of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway, will share the latest developments…

Fun times are always had in serverless-town. This session started off with cutting a server in half.

One thing I walked away from the session with is that cold start times have been cut by 80% this year, which is amazing. In a post-session chat, I found out that VPC cold starts are still going to be slow until they re-architect how Lambda attaches the ENI; I’d hoped that some of the container networking work released this year would help but apparently the sausage isn’t made that way.

SRV307 — Operating Your Serverless API in Production at Scale (video)

In this session, you will learn how to deploy, monitor and manage your serverless APIs in production. We will deep dive into advanced capabilities of API Gateway that enable…

SRV308 — Securing Serverless Applications Step-by-step (video)

You need a new approach to security for serverless applications. Classic approaches just don’t make sense, because tools and process can only take you so far…

This was an excellent talk. Mark Nunnikhoven’s practical, clear approach to application security made this a fun walk-through of practical steps that developers and organizations can take to make their serverless applications more secure. 100% recommended.

SRV310 — Designing Microservices with Serverless

When designing microservices there are a number of things to think about. Just for starters, the bounds of their functionality, how they communicate with their dependencies,…

SRV320 — Best Practices for Using AWS Lambda with RDS/RDBMS Solutions (Chalk Talk)

Are you considering using AWS Lambda with your RDS/RDBMS solutions, but don’t know where to start? In this session, we look at recommended architectural patterns and best…

SRV321 — Serverless Reactive Microservices on AWS (Chalk Talk)

In this talk, we will cover the concepts of Reactive Microservices Architecture, a set of patterns and best practices for implementing backend systems with very high scaling…

SRV329 — Lessons in Serverless Architecture for IoT from iRobot (Chalk Talk)

The event-driven nature of serverless architecture is a natural fit for IoT use cases. In this chalk talk, we cover iRobot’s use case and requirements, detail the serverless…

SRV401 — Become a Serverless Black Belt: Optimizing Your Serverless Applications (video)

Are you an experienced serverless developer who wants a handy guide to unleash the full power of serverless architectures for your production workloads? Do you have questions…

SRV403 — Serverless Authentication and Authorization: Identity Management for Serverless Applications

Many serverless applications need a way to manage end user identities and support sign-ups and sign-ins. Join this session to learn real-world design patterns for…

SRV425 — Serverless OAuth: Authorizing Third-Party Applications to Your Serverless API (Workshop)

By using serverless architectures, startups, and enterprises are building and running modern applications and services with increased agility and simplified scalability, all…

Security

SID205 — Building the Largest Repo for Serverless Compliance-as-Code (video)

When you use the cloud to enable speed and agility, how do you know if you did it right? We are on a mission to help builders follow industry best practices within security…

SID312 — DevSecOps Capture the Flag (Workshop)

Notice: This Workshop requires a laptop computer and an active AWS account with Administrator privileges. In this Capture the Flag workshop, we divide groups into teams and…

SID332 — Identity Management for Your Users and Apps: A Deep Dive on Amazon Cognito (video)

Learn how to set up an end-user directory, secure sign-up and sign-in, manage user profiles, authenticate and authorize your APIs, federate from enterprise and social…

SID343 — User Management and App Authentication with Amazon Cognito (Workshop)

Notice: This Workshop requires a laptop computer and an active AWS account with Administrator privileges. Are you curious about how to authenticate and authorize your…

SID401 — Let’s Dive Deep Together: Advancing Web Application Security (Chalk Talk)

Beginning with a recap of best practices in CloudFront, AWS WAF, Route 53, and Amazon VPC security, we break into small teams to work together on improving the security of a…

SID402 — An AWS Security Odyssey: Implementing Security Controls in the World of Internet, Big Data, IoT and E-Commerce Platforms (Workshop)

Notice: This Workshop requires a laptop computer and an active AWS account with Administrator privileges. This workshop will give participants the opportunity to take a…

Financial Services

FSV301 — Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid

At AWS, security is job zero. Our infrastructure is architected for the most data-sensitive, financial services companies in the world. We have worked with global enterprises…

Big Data

ABD301 — Analyzing Streaming Data in Real Time with Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. In this session,…

ABD401 — How Netflix Monitors Applications in Near Real-Time with Amazon Kinesis

Thousands of services work in concert to deliver millions of hours of video streams to Netflix customers every day. These applications vary in size, function, and technology,…

Architecture

ARC316 — Getting from Here to There: A Journey from On-premises to Serverless Architecture

In this session, go on a journey from traditional, on-premises applications and architecture to pure cloud-native environments. This transformative approach highlights the…

ARC401 — Serverless Architectural Patterns and Best Practices

As serverless architectures become more popular, customers need a framework of patterns to help them identify how they can leverage AWS to deploy their workloads without…

Networking

NET203 — Using Amazon VPC Flow Logs to Do Predictive Security Analytics (Workshop)

Ready to secure your network and application in near real-time using Amazon VPC flow logs and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)? In this workshop, we incorporate advanced…

This seemed like it was going to be a really interesting workshop; unfortunately the majority of the time was spent in lead-up and very little time was spent on the parts that I was interested in. I’m hoping to put together something that covers the data enrichment parts of the process and gets into the machine learning — certainly not an area of expertise for me, but perhaps something I can post about as I learn.

NET403 — Deep Dive: AWS Direct Connect and VPNs

As enterprises move to the cloud, robust connectivity is often an early consideration. AWS Direct Connect provides a more consistent network experience for accessing your AWS…

DevOps

DEV401 — Advanced DevOps Practices for AWS (Workshop)

Advanced DevOps Practices for AWS is designed to provide concise and prescriptive guidance on how to build proper DevOps solutions in AWS using common patterns and best…

Mobile

MBL305 — Implement User Onboarding, Sign-Up, and Sign-In for Mobile and Web Applications with Amazon Cognito

Learn how to use Amazon Cognito to build the user identity management workflows, including user on-boarding, sign-up, and sign-on for mobile and web applications.

Machine Learning

MCL212 — AWS DeepLens workshop: Building Computer Vision Applications (Workshop)

In this workshop, developers have the opportunity to learn how to build and deploy computer vision models, such as face detection and object analysis using the AWS DeepLens…

There was no way that I was going to make it into one of these sessions; they were easily the most popular workshops of the week, announced during the Andy Jassy keynote, with 15 repeat sessions throughout Wednesday and Thursday. Two lucky colleagues did get in and had fun with their new DeepLens devices; I’m hoping they share their experience with the rest of us.

Databases

DAT405 — Workshop on Advanced Design Patterns for Amazon DynamoDB (Workshop)

Join us for the first-ever Amazon DynamoDB practical hands-on workshop. This session is designed for developers, engineers, and database administrators who are involved in…

I am so bummed that I missed this. It would have been fantastic to get some non-trivial practical experience with DynamoDB. I wish AWS posted their workshop material online so that folks could play around with the examples.