Key take aways from re:Invent 2024
Jimmy Dahlqvist
?? AWS Serverless Hero ?? AWS Ambassador & User Group Leader ?? AWS Certification Lead SME ?? Public Speaker ?? Cloud Architect ??
Re:Invent 2024 is over and I have arrived back home again. This was my 9th re:Invent and I have seen how it has grown and changed over the years. 2016 was my first year and the venues was mainly Venetian and Mirage. Now in 2024 it stretches the entire Strip from Mandalay Bay to Wynn. I would love to see re:Invent 2025 become more centralised again either in the north end or the south end.
In this post I'll summarise my key takeaways for this year.
Community
The AWS Community is alive and thriving, with Community Builders, User Group Leaders, and AWS Heroes. Then on the partner side with the AWS Ambassadors.
This year was my first re:Invent as an AWS Hero, I feel so grateful to be able to come to Las Vegas and hang out with all my friends in this community. What always strikes me is how openminded and friendly everyone is. Trying to help and support as much as they can.
It would not be the same if I couldn't come to Vegas and hang out with all these amazing people.
Keynotes
As usual I attended some of the keynotes, I prioritised Matts keynote and of course Werners, I would never miss that.
Matt Garmans Keynote
Matt started of with a shoutout to the AWS Heroes as the most passionate developers on AWS, thank you Matt.
He continues in true CEO keynote spirit with introducing new services and features together with guests from AWS Customers, including S3 Metadata and Aurora DSQL and customers Apple and JP Morgan Chase. Some of the releases are covered more in depth further down in this post.
Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote
Werner talked about "Simplexity", how things can be simple on the surface but extremely complex behind the scene. He introduced 6 lessons for "Keeping it simple"
He used S3, Application Load Balancer, and Route53 to demonstrate these new lessons.
He urged everyone to share their lessons, and highlighted the AWS Heroes as the group of people that continuously share our lessons, and asked everyone to "Listen to the AWS Heroes". Where some Heroes took his ending statement "Now Go Build" to the letter and created and easy way for everyone to "Listen to the Heroes" and created: https://listen-to-the-heroes.com/
Sessions
re:Invent is a learning conference. Networking with the community and learn from others is one part and attending sessions is the second part in a successful meaningful re:Invent packed with learning.
In this part I like to highlight some of the top five, in my meaning, sessions that I attended or know is really good, all of them are available on YouTube.
SAS315 - SaaS meets cell-based architecture: A natural multi-tenant fit
Tod Golding take the stage and talk about building a multi-tenant SaaS architecture and how cell-based architectures can be used to build scalable, resilient, and cost efficient solutions. He dives deep on cell-based multi-tenant architecture to discover the strategies, patterns, and considerations that come with employing this model.
SAS305 - SaaS architecture pitfalls: Lessons from the field
Bill Tarr take the stage and talk about valuable lessons from his 7+ years building SaaS solutions on AWS. In this session he explores a range of different patterns, including common technical and business themes that have impacted the scale, growth, and cost efficiency of SaaS offerings. He tells you about the technical nuances, architecture challenges, and operational impacts that undermine the success of SaaS businesses.
SVS401 - Best practices for serverless developers
Fellow AWS Hero Ran Isenberg and Julian Wood take the stage and talk about to take advantage of the full power of serverless architectures for your production workloads. In this session they provide architectural best practices, optimizations, and useful shortcuts that experts can use to build secure, high-scale, and high-performance serverless applications.
领英推荐
DAT424 - Get started with Amazon Aurora DSQL
Marc Brooker take the stage and talk about the new Aurora DSQL service. He tell you about the new relational database, Amazon Aurora DSQL, that combines the best of serverless experience, Amazon Aurora performance, and Amazon DynamoDB scale. He alos guides you through the fundamentals of Aurora DSQL. How Aurora DSQL can work within your architecture, makes you understand key considerations and tradeoffs, and explores what an application architecture could look like.
API402 - Building advanced workflows with AWS Step Functions
The always brilliant Eric Johnson take the stage to teach us about Step Functions. In this session he tells us about architectural best practices and repeatable patterns for building advanced workflows. Discover how to build secure, high-scale, and high-performance serverless applications while being cost-effective. He also show how the newly released features JSONata support, variables, and private API endpoint connections can make your workflows more efficient and reduce cost.
Top 5 releases
This is my top 5 releases during pre:Invent and re:Invent.
S3 table bucket and queryable metadata (via Iceberg tables) functionality.
S3 dropped two new features, a new bucket type S3 tables (Iceberg tables) for analytics workloads. Creating a great foundation for your data-lake.
Also introduces was the capture of automatic metadata about objects, making it possible to query for objects using any Iceberg compatible tool like Athena.
VPC Origins is a new feature for CloudFront.
This is a release and a feature that I have wanted for so long. The ability to use private VPC based services, like ALBs as origins. This way we can enforce that clients access our ALB over a CloudFront distribution and not directly.
Amazon Aurora DSQL
This might be the biggest release for serverless systems in years, it was at least the release that got me the most excited. I often advocates that not all data storage and access is suited for DynamoDB, requiring a relational database. Until now this has required that you run in an VPC to access the data. With this new serverless database we can use relational database without the need for an VPC. This service is still in preview.
Share AWS resources across VPC and account boundaries with PrivateLink, VPC Lattice, EventBridge, and Step Functions
This release enables us share single resources like EC2, ECS, EKS, and even HTTPS endpoints across VPC and account boundaries, with EventBridge and Step Functions. Creating a great new way to build event-driven architectures.
Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, a unified data lakehouse
The release of SageMaker Lakehouse creates a data Lakehouse that unifies all your data across Amazon S3 data lakes and Amazon Redshift data warehouses. SageMaker Lakehouse gives you the flexibility to access and query data in-place with Apache Iceberg open standard. That this is under SageMaker feels a bit strange though.
Ending words
re:Invent is the largest learning conference in the world. The opportunities to learn from AWS and the best in the community is priceless. For me re:Invent is the start of the next year, this is where I gather inspiration and learn about coming trends in the industry. Invaluable learning to help me do an even better job.
Read my blog where I share my lessons working on AWS.
#ListenToTheHeroes
Helping Organisations Accelerate K8s adoption | Migrate Faster | Low code Container Orchestration
2 个月Jimmy Dahlqvist"Sounds like an incredible re:Invent experience! Your takeaways on community, keynotes, and top releases really capture the energy and innovation of the event. I’d love to connect and hear more about your thoughts, especially on how tools like Aurora DSQL and advancements in serverless architectures are shaping the future. Are you open to meeting up to discuss potential synergies and share insights? Let me know!"
Senior Certification Exam Development Program Manager
2 个月So incredibly grateful this community put us in the same place at the same time! Grateful for your friendship, Jimmy Dahlqvist and all of your mentorship and collaboration over the last 4.5 years. ??
Sr Account Manager & Innovation Speaker at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
2 个月Great takeaways! Thank you Jimmy ????
SaaS Technical Strategist at AWS
2 个月Thanks for the shout out Jimmy Dahlqvist! Good seeing you a couple times, but we need to catch up for real soon!
Full-stack Dev | DevRel | TypeScript | Next.js | AWS Community Builder | Women In Tech Sweden Social Media Specialist
2 个月Having our AWS UG Sk?ne team together at AWS re:Invent (you and ?? Marcus Bladh) was a huge privilege. Thank you for all the guidance, mentoring, and incredible moments, and for making my first re:Invent a unique and unforgettable experience. ??