AWS Re:Invent 2021 - my summary

AWS Re:Invent is one of the key events in the year if you work in the cloud space. The event has many purposes.

• It is a the opportunity for AWS to make big announcements.
• It is also a massive sales and marketing opportunity, for AWS, partners and customers
• It is a technical conference. There are many workshops, chalk talks and hand on sessions to learn more about AWS products and deep dive into specific areas

2021 was been a slightly weird year after last years event was completely virtual due to the pandemic. This year was my 3rd in-person Re:Invent. It was also a celebration of 15 years of AWS and the 10th Re:Invent. However it was a smaller scale than previous years due to travel restrictions and was planned as an in-person and virtual event.

I will not comment on any of the virtual elements as I have had no experience of them at this point.

The new boy

One of the other big changes was a change to the keynote speakers. There are now a few keynotes but the big two are the AWS CEO and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. With Jeff Bezos taking a step back from running Amazon, Andy Jassy the AWS CEO stepped up to be group CEO. Adam Selipsky has now returned to AWS as the new CEO after a 5 year stint running Tableau.

Adam was a capable and engaging speaker, but I don't think he had quite the wow factor of the last in-person Re:Invent. I think he will probably grow into the role and presenting the Re:Invent keynote is only a tiny part of being AWS CEO. Maybe next year there will be a bit more build up and use of the house band again.

Re:Invent keynotes are alway like preaching to the choir - most of the people there would consider themselves loyal AWS fans. So it is an easy crowd that normally clap and cheer each announcement. There is also a good energy with a warm up band or DJ (even at 08:30!)

Sponsorship

Another big change this year (over 2019) is the absence of one of Re:Invents biggest sponsors. Intel was previously a platinum sponsor, lanyard sponsor and Re:Play sponsor. After AWS their brand was the most recognisable at Re:Invent. There are a couple obvious changes that have occurred in the processor world that could account for their absence:

• AWS are now pushing their own ARM based Graviton silicon more than ever
• Although most AWS instances still use Intel, there is more and more AMD instance types. AMD are becoming much more dominant in the high end, GPU and ML space
• Intel as a company have not kept up with the competition and are not the power house the once were.

This did not have any material effect on Re:Invent but may be important for the wider tech world.

One think that is worth noting if you are a marketing person - I have no idea about the sponsors of last years virtual Re:Invent. They have made no impression at all. It shows the advantage of actually being there...

Covid

It is hard to consider an international event without discussing the current pandemic situation. Travel restrictions have stopped many participants from attending. There were a couple of events I attended that normally have a large Aussie presence. They were noticeably absent.

Travel was a bit more complicated with all the different countries travel restrictions, but mostly the late changes from the US (without this UK/EU participants would not have been able to attend) meant that final prep was very rushed.

One of the things I would say is Re:Invent felt safe. Mask wearing and other measures were much more obvious and enforced than in the UK. All delegates had their vaccine status checked and because of the international travel, a sizeable proportion of people had tested negative for covid before attending.

One change was there were far fewer refreshments in corridors between rooms (although there were some). I think this was probably to allow more space for people flow and also to encourage people to eat and drink in designated areas where they could sit down, distance and take of their masks.

The venue

There was a slight venue change this year, but the heart of the event was still the Sands Expo at the Venetian. This was partly due to the slightly smaller conference and also due to the opening of the new Caesars Forum conference centre next to the Venetian. There was no MGM Grand this year. This made moving around the conference much quicker (there was a bridge between two of the venues) so less time wasted on shuttle busses.

Behind the console

One of the most interesting events fo me at Re:Invent is the Peter Desantis keynote. Peter is the head of EC2 at AWS and normally delves deep into some of the inner workings of AWS. His is normally the most technical of all the keynotes. One of the things that is most impressive about AWS is some of the hardware innovations they have developed.

The Nitro card to offload and manage virtualisation has been a massive boost for AWS. It has allowed them to develop the most secure virtualisation on the market as well as offloading virtualisation from the processor. It has also allowed them to quickly add new instances like the mac m1 instances (just announced).

AWS are now deploying SSD with Nitro processors so they can more precisely control SSD performance. One of the big things AWS care about is not just overall performance but consistency.

Peter also covered how the sharding used by S3 was also an important element in s3 performance. By sharding objects and having redundancy, multiple drives are used for object retrieval allowing it to be much faster than accessing a large object from a single hard disk. One of the things that is very apparent is the size of AWS is a real advantage. A smaller operator would not be able to balance load nearly as effectively.

Peter also discussed some of the limitations to processor speed and the improvements to Graviton 3 to make it faster. They have really focused on real world performance rather than sticker figures like clock speed. I look forward to doing some of my one benchmarking with real world code...

Also on show in the AWS village was some of the AWS hardware. They had full rack, 2u and 1u outposts as well as one of their purpose built high speed switches (it is completely unrecognisable if you are only familiar with small business/domestic switches).

The level of innovation you get with AWS is phenomenal.

The people

The year before I attended a few virtual Re:Invent sessions and the keynotes. All the content was fine, but what I missed was that human interaction. The ability to chat and ask questions. This year I attended a session about rolling out IoT devices. I have worked on IoT but I am normally involved in the early part of the lifecycle and limited deployments. I have never worked on a large scale roll out so how you manage the certificates was a bit of a mystery (although I had some ideas). After a session, it was good to be able to chat with the presenters and ask them about some of the specific real world problems. It is these little chats, meeting experts and discussing problems where I get the real value from at conferences. There is no virtual version of this. Its also not just AWS staff. There are other presenters or other people who attend the sessions.

Summary

There were clearly some things missing from Re:Invent last year but overall it was great to see people back together in person. Re:Invent is always very much what you make of it. This time with it being a bit smaller and less AWS representatives there it was a not as good as previously. It was so much better than the virtual event, but I look forward to a full size event in 2022.