This year is the 10th anniversary of AWS re:Invent, taking place as a hybrid event both in person and online.
In spite of Las Vegas being the worst place in America, I’m going to be there for the week to hang out with my fellow ambassadors and user group leaders, as well as AWS teams we work with, and other people from the community. If you’re going too, let me know!
Here are some of the sessions and events you might want to check out, either from the live stream, or in person.
Here’s my "I just got off a transatlantic flight" face from 2019
Keynotes
The keynotes are usually where most of the new product announcements take place, so they’re always my first port of call. These will be streamed direct from The Venetian, so you’ll be able to watch them from wherever you are.
Global Partner Summit Keynote
(Monday Nov 29th, 1500 PST / 2300 GMT)
Since we’re an AWS Consulting Partner I’ll be attending this one. If you’re building a SaaS solution on AWS, becoming an AWS Technology Partner comes with a number of benefits including joint marketing opportunities. If you’d like to know more about partnership with AWS, this is the keynote to join.
Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS
(Tuesday Nov 30th, 0830 PST / 1630 GMT)
This is Adam’s first re:Invent since he replaced Andy Jassy as AWS CEO in May. He’ll be sharing insights and news about AWS customers, products and services.
Typically this first keynote starts with the presenter bragging about how much bigger AWS is than the other cloud platforms, and then goes on to show off some big name customer stories from brands you might recognise.
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP Amazon Machine Learning
(Wednesday Dec 1st, 0830 PST / 1630 GMT)
I’ve got to be honest, I probably won’t be going along to this keynote, since I have very little personal or professional interest in ML. If teaching computers to think is your thing (did you learn nothing from half a century of science fiction cinema?) you might want to check this one out.
Peter DeSantis, Senior VP of Utility Computing and Apps
(Wednesday Dec 1st, 1500 PST / 2300 GMT)
You can tell Peter is an engineer by background, because his keynote is at a sensible time in the afternoon.
In this keynote, you can probably expect some interesting technical details about how AWS works under the hood, content I’ve always found interesting.
Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com
(Thursday Dec 2nd, 0830 PST / 1630 GMT)
Werner is one of those unique beasts, a CTO at a huge company who can still talk in detail about the technology his teams work with every day. His keynotes always have some great perspectives on architectural patterns and on operations, many other CTOs could learn a thing or two from this guy.
SaaS Sessions
If you’re building SaaS on AWS, there’s plenty of content for you this year. I believe that, whilst these won’t be live streamed, they’ll be made available online after the event. Here are some highlights:
| Session ID | Title | Date/Time |
|---|---|---|
| GPS311 | Building multi-tenant-aware SaaS microservices on AWS | Mon 29 Nov, 1130 PST |
| ARC401 | Serverless SaaS deep dive: Inside a multi-tenant serverless solution | Mon 29 Nov, 1345 |
| ARC306 | SaaS architecture patterns: From concept to implementation | Tue 30 Nov, 1915 PST |
| ARC405 | Inside a working serverless SaaS reference solution | Wed 1 Dec, 0915 PST |
| ARC402 | Amazon EKS SaaS deep dive: A multi-tenant EKS SaaS solution | Fri 3 Dec, 1130 PST |
Fun Things
If you’re visiting in person, there are a couple of other things I always recommend checking out
Midnight Madness
(Sunday Nov 28th, 2230 PST)
The Midnight Madness event is usually an eclectic mix of entertainment, with the first product launch announcement kicking off proceedings. I’ll have just flown in, and it’ll be 0630hrs in my body clock when the event kicks off, so whether I’ll make it this year is questionable!
re:Play
(Thursday Dec 2nd, 1930 PST)
Billed as “the coolest party in tech”, re:Play provides food, drink, activities, and some impressive musical highlights. Previous years have seen DJs like Skrillex and Deadmau5 perform, and musicians such as Anderson .Paak (that full stop isn’t a typo, seemingly). They must surely have something pretty special lined up for the 10th anniversary.
I’ll be live tweeting the keynote sessions over on Twitter. Follow us: @scalefactory
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