My AWS re:Invent 2017
Friday/Saturday
It was my first time going to Las Vegas; I arrived on Friday night so that I could enjoy the weekend and start to know my way around the strip.
Vegas is vast; I walked about 20km each day.
Sunday
I registered as soon as possible on Sunday, and I even joined the first event of the week: Midnight Madness.
Andy Jassy talked about the beginning of AWS, they launched the first new service Amazon Sumerian, and we then enjoyed DJ Diesel (aka Shaquille O’Neal) until 1 am.
Monday
On Monday I met with the A Cloud Guru crew in a lounge at the Aria.
It was great to be able to talk directly about the future of Cloud Guru, especially since they just launched their membership program.
In the evening I attended the Global Partner Summit welcome reception at the MGM’s nightclub (Hakkasan) where I encountered a lot of familiar faces.
Tuesday
Tuesday was the opening of the expo hall, so I spent most of my day going around the booths talking with known partners or discovering new ones.
There was also another welcome reception in the evening with the opening of “The Park” which hosted a lot of fun activities (Battling cage, giant beer pong, broomball…).
Finally, I went to the Tuesday Night Live to get first seats to the new announcements, and I wasn’t disappointed: Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances and Amazon GuardDuty!
Wednesday
Wednesday started with Andy Jassy’s keynote, I did not want to get up early to get a seat, so I watched this one remotely.
So many announcements during this keynote, the most interesting for me are Amazon Neptune, Aurora Multi-Master, and Aurora Serverless…
I spent the afternoon trying to figure out as much as I could about all the new services before going to the Pub Crawl across most of the bars of the Venitian.
To finish this evening, a special reception was organized for all French people (we were only 300 across the 40000+ re:Invent attendees).
A perfect occasion to meet new people closer to home.
Thursday
Another day, another keynote. This time I watched from the certification lounge, but I expected a lot more from Werner Vogel’s keynote.
Usually, he is the one announcing the best news at re:Invent however this time it seems Andy got it all the day before.
I hang out at the expo hall until the evening…
The long-awaited re:Play party from 8 pm to midnight: Arcade games, Fun activities, Food & Drinks and most of all, an amazing concert from DJ Snake.
AWS #reInvent re:Play party with @djsnake ! pic.twitter.com/g0x7EzFaRY
— Arthur N. (@sys_less) December 1, 2017
Friday
Officially last day of re:Invent, in reality, there are only a few breakout sessions in the morning, and everyone is hung over from the re:Play party.
So I did not even go to any of the venues this day, and instead, I met back with other French people to hang out in Vegas.
Conclusion
That concludes this week as I flew back to Paris on Saturday morning.
It was the first event of this magnitude that I attended, and I really enjoyed it.
I will definitely come back next year.
It’s the best place to meet other passionate AWS experts.
