Day Three at re:Invent ??

Another day at re:Invent 2023 is over, with some exceptionally interesting, innovative, and exciting sessions to talk about. Plus, some of the team spent some time supporting the community impact sessions that can be found around the conference! ????

Kogilan Arunthavalingam started that day reflecting on a day two session and what he could bring back to his team in the coming weeks. His what he had to say about TNC105 | Building and deploying a containerized application with Amazon EKS:

"I attended a spotlight lab (TNC105) that was centered on installing and using CLI tools for Amazon EKS and Kubernetes. During this session, I learnt how to build an Amazon EKS cluster and a node group. The process also involved deploying a sample application into the cluster. The hands-on experience was incredibly insightful, especially in understanding how EKS and Kubernetes work together seamlessly. Navi Kaur was excellent, making complex topics accessible and interesting. I found the lab extremely beneficial for my project, as it deepened my practical knowledge of Kubernetes."

Martyn S. kicked off his day at the at the Wynn to join INO301 | The architect’s guide to agile innovation:

"Great session in the Chalk Talk format with extremely knowledgeable and engaging speakers. We heard about how to get the value out of innovation prototypes and get them "ready for prime time" in production. We learnt how to organise for innovation by fostering the right culture, organising your team's, and of course selecting the right architecture for your project. A laser focus on the customer's needs is part of Amazon's DNA, so when innovating there's no difference. Find out who they are and where they operate, and use techniques such as "working backwards" to drive excitement and momentum around your project. Too many projects can die or simply fail to deliver any value without this engagement. Adopt the right architectural patterns and avoid anti-patterns to get your prototype working quickly and into a pilot phase. Use serverless and managed services that map to your NFRs, build your infrastructure as code, and decouple your architecture. Innovation through prototyping is a great way to drive modernisation of workloads, whether it's monoliths to microservices, or a complex cloud migration"

CPO, Abi Griffin also spent some time reflecting on a day two session, BIZ225-INT | C-suite leaders talk generative AI and applications. Whilst not the session Abi was hoping for, there was still a great insight to take away:

"I was really looking forward to hearing from other c-suite leaders on how generative AI has changed the way they deal with similar business challenges to our own. The talk however, while useful, did not provide the insight I was hoping for. It was reassuring to hear that actually a lot of companies are still exploring, innovating, and trialing new capabilities to see what works for them. Gemba are in a similar position and will undoubtedly be able to implement wider tooling, and some are being launched soon that were announced at the Adam Selipsky 's keynote"

Stephen Murray enjoyed an impactful session exploring Karpenter, CON306 | Karpenter: Amazon EKS best practices and cloud cost optimization:

"I've just come out of a two-hour workshop on Karpenter, an open-source Kubernetes node autoscaling product. It's amazingly powerful as a result of taking a different approach from traditional auto-scaling groups. It makes decisions on launching or terminating nodes based on observing the resource requirements of unscheduled pods. It uses the concept of Node Pools, which have defined limits for CPU and memory and will launch nodes of an appropriate type and size to meet those requirements, including consolidating workloads onto fewer nodes when appropriate. This means you do need to be accurate in defining container resource requirements, which isn't always done effectively, so something to look out for. It also works seamlessly with Spot Instances and Savings Plans and supports heterogeneous architectures within the same cluster. A very flexible product and a great hands-on session to start getting to grips with it."

Amber Peacock and Toby Marshall headed over to the Venetian to partake in a few of the community impact activities being hosted at re:Invent this year.

The first is called Project Light-A-Life where attendees were assembling emergency solar powered lights, boxing them up, and loading them into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Disaster Response truck. The lights will be shipped out to people impacted by natural and man-made disasters, as well as unhoused people in the Las Vegas area.

The second was the Hydrate and Help hub that is a community impact project from Fill It Forward and LaunchDarkly . This year you can scan QR codes around the conference when you fill your re:Invent bottle to activate a $5 donation, but in addition you can visit the hub and do laps of their water track to generate even more donations. The track simulates the daily reality of millions of people, usually women and children, around the world who have to carry exceptional heavy loads across long distances in order to have access to water.