Introduction

In late November I had the incredible opportunity to attend AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas. It was my first time attending AWS re:Invent and the sheer scale of the event blew me away. During the week-long conference, there were many events and activities to dive in to learning AWS opportunities and connect with AWS professionals. In this post, I have taken the time to reflect on my highlights of the conference.

A big thank you to the AWS Ambassador program and CyberCX for providing me the opportunity to go to AWS re:Invent.

Meeting the AWS Ambassadors

The AWS Ambassador program has played a large role in my AWS professional development. I became a member of the AWS Ambassador program last year, 2023. AWS Ambassadors are from a global community of AWS professionals, with in-depth AWS knowledge who actively contribute their expertise to the public. Through the AWS Ambassador program, I was able to go to AWS re:Invent.

Every year, many of the AWS Ambassadors meet up at AWS re:Invent. It was great to meet several of the AWS Ambassadors for the first time in person. The AWS Ambassador team had organized a meetup at Beer Park on one of the nights during AWS re:Invent. This was a fun social event where we could have a friendly chat and get to know other fellow AWS ambassadors over a drink.

Attending the AWS Keynote

The most anticipated events at AWS re:Invent are likely the Keynote sessions. These sessions are hosted by AWS top leaders and are typically where new AWS products and services are announced. These Keynote sessions are available online, however as this was my first time being physically present at re:Invent, I put in some extra effort to queue early and get a good seat for the Keynote session presented by AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky.

I was astounded by the size of the keynote hall that catered for a large seated audience. There were several high-res presentation screens across the full width of the hall. If you could not see the stage you would still have a clear view of the presentation live on the screens.

Unsurprisingly, this year there was a large focus on AI/ML and GenAI services that were announced. Below are some of my personal top announcements covered in AWS re:Invent 2023.

Amazon Q - GenAI assistant

The star announcement of AWS re:Invent 2023 is the launch of Amazon Q. Amazon Q is an AWS expert assistant powered by gen-AI. Amazon Q is available in the AWS console as a chat bot. You can ask it your AWS questions using natural language and it will provide answers which can include cited source links.

Amazon Q is also integrated in to several other AWS services such as the following:

• Amazon Reshift - use Amazon Q help generate SQL queries.

• QuickSight - Amazon Q can use data from QuickSight to generate stories and executive summaries.

• Amazon Connect - use Amazon Q to provide call agents with recommended responses and actions for a customer.

Amazon Q can also integrate with IDEs to help with your coding. Supported IDE currently are AWS Cloud 9, Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. Through the IDE integration, you can ask Amazon Q chat coding questions. You can also highlight and send snippets of code to Amazon Q to explain, refactor, fix and other actions.

I already can see myself using Amazon Q on a daily basis to deliver solutions in AWS. It will be interesting to watch how this service improves and what other service integrations will come.

Amazon CodeWhisperer - Support for Infrastructure as Code

Originally announced in April 2023, Amazon CodeWhisper can generate code suggestions for the most populate programming languages such as Python, Java, JavaScript and more. CodeWhisperer can also help detect and remediate security vulnerabilities in your code.

Keeping up with the AI theme of AWS re:Invent 2023 announcements, Amazon CodeWhisperer now support Infrastructure as Code (IaC) languages including CloudFromation, AWS CDK (Typescript, Python) and Terraform.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

A new storage class was announced for Amazon S3 called Express One Zone. This storage class is ideal for applications requiring high quantity of small object storage with low retrieval latency. An example application could be with for AI/ML training cluster of many computes nodes needing to access training data comprised of a lot of small files. The ML training can be carried out using Amazon SageMaker Model Training which can be used with Amazon S3 Express One Zone.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone offers consistent single-digit millisecond request latency at request costs 50% lower than S3 Standard storage class. Objects are stored in a single availability zone with an availability SLA of 99.9%.

New Region: Asia Pacific Auckland

This is not actually a new announcement, however it was great to see at the Keynote new AWS regions including Auckland New Zealand (my home country) coming soon.

Wandering through the expo

AWS re:Invent has a large expo hall filled with many vendor stalls, showcasing tools and services that can help with your AWS workloads. It was enjoyable to wander around the expo and discover vendors, talk to them and learn about the AWS related solutions they had to offer. In addition to getting a lot of free swag, I also took back new knowledge of tools and services that could help with my AWS challenges.

Once again that AI/ML was a major theme present at the expo. Many vendors were incorporating AI into their services or facilitating implementation of AI/ML. I saw several cloud management tools using AI to detect and analyze events of interest such as a security incident. I also had stumbled across and several Vector database solutions which was my first time learning about them (Vector databases specialize in storing data types that are using in AI applications).

AWS had their own expo booths where I went to talk to several AWS professionals. These included AWS Ambassadors volunteering to man the booths. It is no secret that AWS offers many different services. At the AWS booths, you can talk to an AWS professional and learn about what AWS services could help in your area.

Attending technical sessions

AWS re:Invent has several technical sessions types that cater to a wide range of AWS experience levels, from beginners to experts. Before the AWS re:Invent conference had started, I had used the AWS attendee portal to browse and plan the sessions I had interests in attending. Some sessions provide reserved seating however these can fill up very fast so it is a good idea to reserve early. There are a lot of sessions across a large venue on the Las Vegas strip so travel time also needed to be factored in when planning.

These sessions are great way to deepen your knowledge of AWS services and solutions. Many sessions often have real customer experience stories which could be very relatable and useful to your own AWS implementations. I attended as many sessions as I could, however knowing that these sessions would later be made available online, I maintained some flexibility with my schedule for other activities such as meeting other AWS professionals.

Conclusion

Attending AWS re:Invent 2023 for the first time was a valuable experience for me. At the event, I was able to meet with professionals from the AWS community including my fellow AWS Ambassadors. In addition, I had a lot of exposure to new ideas, solutions and services by attending the keynotes, expo and technical sessions. All of this experience I will be taking with me to deliver better solutions in AWS going forward.