AWS Summit 2019

A few thoughts and photos on the Sydney AWS Summit 2019.

Talks

✔️ Keynotes

  • Amazon introduction very “cinematic” and entertaining as usual
  • Werner Vogels talks were great
  • Rugby talk about their use of analytics in the real world was well done
  • Live demo on the second day (simplistic Robomaker + RL example) was a bit of a letdown compared to last year’s Unicorn/Hotdog computer vision demo
  • A few vendor talks not worth mentioning
  • They didn’t actually fly the drone :(

✔️ Executing Migrations at the Speed of Light: How to Maximise Your Velocity (Level 300)

Really interesing talk on the culture changes needed for a successful migration. Hoping to get the slides for this when it comes out on Youtube. Also a demo on CloudEndure which seemed nice for lift and shift.

✔️ Deep Dive into Firecracker: Using Lightweight Virtual Machines to Enhance the Container Security Boundary (Level 300)

One of the few actually technical talks; started at assembly and went through hypervisors, process segregation and eventually an impressive demo of Firecracker.

➖ Control and Monitor Microservices on AWS Using AWS App Mesh (Level 300)

Gave an okay overview of AWS App Mesh’s architecture, but it didn’t delve in to anything useful beyond that. The demo was for a toy app and didn’t actually touch on anything that you’d find service mesh useful for.

❌ AIOps - Steps Towards Autonomous Operations (Level 300)

The talk consisted of 15 minutes of “enable monitoring” (really?) and “anomaly detection/forcasting on timeseries”. There was nothing you could use in the real world in this talk.

❌ Headfirst and All In - Autotrader’s Learnings on Adopting Kubernetes at Speed with Vibrato (Sponsored by Vibrato)

This talk didn’t seem well thought out; it didn’t really get to any point and there wasn’t anything said that wasn’t obvious.

Missed

On the TODO list when the Youtube videos come out.

  • ❓ Create Modern Serverless Web Applications in Minutes Using the AWS Amplify Framework (Level 300)
  • ❓ A Data Driven Roadmap to Enterprise AI Strategy (Sponsored by Contino)

AWS Developer Night

Really good. It was fast-paced (“lightning talk” style) and full of energy. The last talk was particularly fun, with a self-proclaimed beginner in Python doing a live coding exercise to write a functional Lambda app integrated with Twilio.

Also, spotted this. New service?

Booths

The certified section was pretty disappointing this year. It seems to get worse each year.

Swag

  • AWS Certified Pins x2
  • Gitlab t-shirt
  • Hashicorp t-shirt
  • New Relic “clouds” socks
  • A Cloud Guru “This Is My Cloud Shirt.” t-shirt
  • Contino “astronaut pug” socks
  • Trend Micro “clouds” socks
  • Sophos “I’m With Awesome” socks
  • Contino Coffee Tumbler
  • Twistlock socks
  • Delphix slim playing cards deck
  • A Cloud Guru pin
  • Linux Academy usb + bottle opener
  • New Relic “I Like APIs & I cannot lie” t-shirt
  • Pagerdurty “cyber heart” t-shirt
  • Okta socks
  • F5 “nerd life” t-shirt
  • Cloud Checkr long sleeved shirt
  • Auth0 t-shirt
  • AWS “Alexa everywhere” t-shirt
  • AWS wristband torch
  • AWS certified metal bottle
  • Kong Cherry MX keycaps x5
  • Sisense “secret sauce”
  • Elastic stress ball
  • Twistlock foam throwing balls
  • Veeam bouncing ball
  • Redhat fidget spinner
  • ? plastic sunglasses
  • An uncountable number of stickers…

The amount of lego prizes was really strange, seemed like every 3rd booth had one as a prize.