re:Invent Day Four Summary - 9.51km walked and Chaos Engineering!

re:Invent Day Four Summary - 9.51km walked

The day began at the MGM Hotel, the new venue for Dr. Werner Vogels much awaited keynote. 

The keynote had a very different feel to previous years with Werner taking us on a journey through the principles of well architected cloud. 

AWS Engineer Claire Liguori took us through the launch of AWS Cloud9, a brand new IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for AWS Lambda with many cool features including pair programming. 

Nora Jones, Senior Chaos Engineer at Netflix was up later sharing her deep experience with Chaos Engineering, with the standout quote being "Chaos engineering doesn't cause problems, it finds them". Do checkout Nora's and the rest of the teams book available for free here: https://www.oreilly.com/webops-perf/free/chaos-engineering.csp

To round out the technical speakers was Abby Fuller, Senior Technical Evangelist and Software Engineer at AWS. Abby talked at length about the journey of containers within AWS and the current state of the union in light of the release of the Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS). More Kubernetes clusters are run today on AWS than anywhere else so the launch of this service making it even easier to get up and running. 

Alexa for Business was released which as the name suggests provides a strong set of features to enable use of Alexa based products within businesses. Think things like the capability to have Alexa devices such as the Echo start meetings and control telephone conferencing equipment and much more. 

There were a good selection of 'quality of life' improvements announced too such as doubling of the memory limit on Lambda functions and Amazon API Gateway support for Private VPCs. The latter will be greatly valued as it negates the need to connect out to the internet to reach an AWS API Gateway. 

The remainder of the day was spent exploring the Expo floor and networking which I will share in a follow up. 

Please check the 'What's New' page for a complete list: https://aws.amazon.com/new/

Distance Waked: 9.51km

T-Shirt Swag Count: 18