In this article I will try to re:Cap a few of the announcements at re:Invent 2023 but also share my personal experiences and learnings that covers what I think that should be shared with the world…!

What happens in Vegas…

…should not always stay in Las Vegas! This year’s re:Invent has been another great experience for me and it was amazing to meet AWS enthutiasts from all of the world. I’ve learned a tons of stuff, saw a bunch of cool sessions and also experienced to be part of a big family. All the friendships that have been build in the past few days, the shared knowledge and experiences that have been shared have a big influecnce on myself and shape me.

The technical aspects of re:Invent

This year the technical aspects of re:Invent existed but where not as important to me as they used to be in my previous attendances. Of course AWS hd a bunch of important announcements – some of them bigger, some smaller. Renato has them written up at InfoQ and the AWS Newsblog has them covered too. Luc, the winner of this years “Now, Go Build” award 2023 has created a web application that helps you to read all of them and not miss a single one.

For me, there are a few that stand out:

• Amazon Q – your new fellow, builder companion that will make you more productive and more successful going forward
• Amazon CodeCatalyst – Enterprise Tier and Custom BluePrints
• myApplications – a managed service that allows you to easier manage, monitory and analyze the usage of an application within the AWS Console
• StepFunctions HTTPs Endpoint Integration – which allows you to integrate HTTPS endpoints or states within your workflows
• Cloudformation Templates from Git – the possibility to have Cloudformation deployed directly from Git

Of course, there where a bunch of other announcement, minor and smaller ones, but these are the ones that I have remembered and thus they are meaningful to me. Now let’s move over to the more important aspects of re:Invent!

The community aspects of re:Invent

re:Invent 2023 has been once more a gathering of the AWS Community in one place and it has brought a lot of us together to talk, laugh and align. Not everyone was able to join us due to different reasons – but I am sure that you have felt the power of the community throughtout the week by following us on the different social channels.

Being part of the AWS Heros

As I posted last year, going to re:Invent means meeting with friends and getting together. Being an AWS Hero, made it more intense than before: We feel community out of our heart and that’s what makes us strong. Wherever I was in Las Vegas, I saw a fellow Hero.

We all have super powers and our powers are different. One of my super-powers is connecting people – and I hope that I was able to show this in the last few days.

Others have other powers – a few of use were able to present one of their talks – Anahit with her spciality around MSK, Anurag around data patterns and Ran on Lambda Power Tools. Others are great listeners and others have the vision of how things need to or should look in a few years – it was great to see everyones powers in one place and I know that combining them we can incluence to make things better!

Thank you, Taylor and the rest of the team, for creating this group and bringing us together again!

Working with Builders, User Group leaders and others from the community

The AWS Community consists of so much more than the Heros. Thank you, dear Community Builders – lead my Jason and the team – for being an unbelievable source of power throughtout the week. Your entuthiasm, your great ideas and your dedication are what makes us stronger. I’ve been reading a lot of the posts from Builders around the globe that were not able to make it to Las Vegas and it is energizing to see that.

The User Group Leaders that we have world wide on the other side help to thrive the AWS Community across the whole yearand bring us together regularly — to learn, to play or to share knowledge. Thank you all, for helping us to shape where the community goes and for making the community successful. I was glad to be able to meet a lot of you and share my experiences as welll as listening to your experiences.

I had the great pleasure to get the whole team of core contributors of the Speakers Directory together and we were able to present our project as well as take a picture of all of use

We are going to continue our investment and will help user group leaders to find speakers through our tool!

Working with AWS employees

This year, I’ve joined the club of many other Heros that go to sessions where they can meet AWS service team members that they have worked with before

I attended a few CodeCatalyst sessions to meet the team that I’ve been working with for more than 12 months “live and in person” and loved to see the energy and innovation live on stage – but I also attended other sessions just to say HI to certain speakers.

Employees at AWS are smart and can often tell you the perspective of WHY something has been build and it’s great to know some more background of a new feature. Thank you all for spending time with me and sharing your thoughts and passion with me!

To those AWS employees in the community and DevRel team – another big THANKS for making the event unforgettable with all of your dedication and support – I love spending time with you and creating new ideas on how to make the AWS community stronger and more engaging than ever before!

A look ahead…

As I try to use my time on the flight to put my head around what I am taking away from the last few days and from re:Invent 2023, I’m still digesting, as many others, what we have all learned and heard.

A few key take-aways:

• AWS doesn’t feel “secure” anymore to be a market leader
• innovation at AWS is coming (Q), but it’s still early stages
• AWS keeps listening to their customers (see the DB2 RDS announcement and the StepFunction HTTP Integration)
• Community Sessions (COM or DEV track) are the ones to attend at re:invent, or sessions that are AWS + a customer (level 300/400)

What I’m considering to do in the next 3 months

First of all I’m planning to cover the CodeCatalyst announcements at my YouTube channel to explain the impact of the new features to interested enterprise customers.

I’m also looking at trying out a lot of the cool things that have been announced in our AWS Speakers Directory Project, besides hosting multiple User Group meetups of the AWS UserGroup Bergstrasse.

What I’m considering to do in 2024

Of course I will continue my engagement in the AWS Förderverein DACH – we are planning another AWS Community Day in Munich next year!

I also plan to continue my work with the the CodeCatalyst team to shape the product – please let me know if YOU have input on what thte next important steps are.

I would love to work with the AWS team to, for 2024 at re:Invent organize another pre:Invent Community Hike and to talk about the possibility of hosting a complete track at re:Invent where Community Members join forces with AWS employees. I listened to a session (Ran Isenberg and Heitor Lessa) and that was a very powerful message.

Last but not least, I would like to help community members to grow and shape their careers in Cloud – if you need help or have questions, do not hesitate to reach out for questions, I’m happy to help or to connect you with someone that can help!

Thank you for reading until this point, if you have any feedback, let me know!

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