The AWS re:Invent 2024 Experience
- Jamie Tyler
- Cloud , Aws
- December 10, 2024
Table of Contents
This was not the first time I had been to re:Invent and things have changed over the years. This is true of Las Vegas and re:Invent. In person, this is the third time with another time being the virtual event when the Covid pandemic was at its height.
The Campus
This is the official campus map from the re:Invent 2024 website.
I had sessions in most of these venues, some on the same day. So the reality is the campus is massive and an example of this is walking from Caesars Forum to The MGM Grand took an hour, on the shuttle bus it was still about 30 minutes due to the F1 breakdown.
There was other conventions in town as well, with the National Finals Rodeo (NFR) coming to town as well at the end of the week. So it is busy out on the strip, let alone the 60,000 odd folks at re:Invent.
To compound the walking, I had an ankle injury earlier in 2024 which started to grumble again making walking uncomfortable.
Tip
Take care when booking sessions that you do not overstretch yourself between venues. I would leave an hour between sessions in different venues even if you have reserved seats as these will be released 10 minutes before the session starts.
The Weather
This year, it was warm and sunny which was fantastic but the year before it was a lot cooler. The picture below was of the worse day and it was still warm.
The Sessions
Let’s be clear some will hit the party scene hard in Vegas and then there are those that don’t. I am in the latter group. I am there to learn as much as I can in the short time I am there. So what does that really mean, frankly it is early starts. Typically, I would get up at 06:00 to be out of the hotel at 07:00 so that I could have breakfast at the venue before my first session which would be 08:30. My last sessions of the day would be between 17:30 and 18:30, depending on the day.
This does not mean that the nights were free to booze it up and enjoy the sights. A few nights I either had Client dinners or catch ups with AWS folks which would mean getting to bed around midnight.
The important element, for me, were the hands on sessions versus the talks as the talks etc. are usually released on YouTube so I knew I could catch up on those. The only exception are the keynotes, but be willing to queue up for those and to get up early!
Some of the topics I covered was.
- CloudWAN
- GenAI (Bedrock)
- Amazon Q
- QuickSight
- Resilience
- AWS Backup
- Frugal Architecture
- Amazon OpenSearch
- CDK
There were others but these were the main ones. These sessions are available on AWS Workshop Studio as self paced labs but you have to pay for the consumption within your own AWS account(s).
Downtime
As I was there Saturday to Saturday there was an opportunity to do things that were not AWS. I took in a show, which was not what I expected and went to the National Finals Rodeo (NFR). I may have had the odd beer too
And Finally..
Expect to feel ill when you get home. You might be lucky, I was last year, but this year I have a heavy cold. Its just the fun of loads of people and air conditioning.
