AWS re:Invent 2020, Week One

7 minute read | Last updated 30-Nov-2020 | An icon depicting a retail tag with a heart for 'favourite' AWS, AWS re:Invent, Cloud

Week one of three for AWS re:Invent 2020 kicks off and this post will be my “live blog” for the week. Check back often for reactions, news, and tips on how to get the most out of the week.

The latest entries will be at the top and unlike the conference, the times here are listed in eastern. Scroll to the bottom, if you want to start from the start of the week.

Remember, I have a separate post with just my take on the latest announcements.

Sunday, 06-Dec

15:00 I managed to watch some on-demand content today to “catch-up.” Specifically, I really wanted to take in, “Building Event Driven Applications With Amazon EventBridge” by Stephen Liedig before week two started.

I enjoyed the talk and have a deep dive available now

Friday, 04-Dec

17:00 After taking in a few talks, I spent the rest of the day working through some announcements and having some great chats with people. Very excited for the week one sessions to be made available on-demand and can’t wait for week two!
09:45 Ben Potter leads the Security Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and delivers, “Security Best Practices the AWS Well Architected Way.”

Excellent talk covering a lot of ground. My deep dive is available now
09:00 Alex DeBrie is a fellow AWS Hero and his worked has literally save me days of work using DynamoDB. Part #2—two parts?!?! how do I get a talk like that?—of his talk airs nows, but I can’t watch it. I need breakfast. My consolation? I have Alex’s amazing book…you should too

At least I managed to review his talk, despite not having watched it:

“Data modelling with Amazon DynamoDB - Part 2”, by @alexbdebrie is currently airing (https://t.co/xCBDkQs4MQ) & I was going to live tweet some reactions

here’s my summary: https://t.co/2xJ1BH6okp << buy it. read it. save time. save tears#reinvent #dat305
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) December 4, 2020
08:15 I’ve been eagerly awaiting this talk, “Monitoring Production Services at Amazon”. My thoughts on this amazing session are available in full
07:30 I watch, “Use computer vision at the edge to improve operations with AWS Panorama”. It’s a very cool service that provides visual analysis tools to existing cameras. More of my thoughts in my Twitter thread 🧵

AWS Panorama (#ml on the edge for cameras) use cases from @awscloud session #EMB015 at #reinvent

📸 pic.twitter.com/IGc2OL9iM3
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) December 4, 2020
07:00 Can I make to all of these sessions? No. Do I want to? Yes.

Thursday, 03-Dec

23:00 This was a weird day for me at the conference. I had two radio spots during the day and a few other meetings. Some related to AWS re:Invent, others—like the radio—where my “regular” responsibilities crept in.

I did, however, get a chance to try out the new Amazon DevOps Guru preview:

Wednesday, 02-Dec

17:00 …and while I might not have watched the sessions I wanted to. I did have some fantastic discussions with people about the new services in public on Twitter and behinds the scenes.

One topic of regular conversation, AWS Proton. Here’s a great point from Forrest Brazeal that sums things up nicely:

spot on 🧵#reinvent https://t.co/Z6sGDGdKNP
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) December 3, 2020
14:00 Despite having a few sessions in my calendar, I somehow don’t manage to watch any. I did however manage to catch this amazing keynote rebuttal from Corey Quinn:

OMFG, yaaaassss

happening right now: https://t.co/lZLm7W6iRZ #reinvent /cc @QuinnyPig @awsreinvent pic.twitter.com/XYlpV4Sj9f
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) December 2, 2020
10:00 I managed to catch a fantastic session on first airing, “Introducing Amazon QuickSight Q: Ask questions on data & get answers in seconds”, EMB005. This feature looks amazing and will help a lot of people get better information from their data…if they get on QuickSight.

Amazon QuickSight is one of my favourite services and it’s also one of the most overlooked in the AWS Cloud. If you’re not using it to view your data, you’re missing out

Tuesday, 01-Dec

23:00 I re-wrote this one a few times but I finally got my thoughts about Andy’s keynote down and published in this post
16:00 Pressing pause on re:Invent to help stop Galactus from eating the looped world of Fortnite. Great way to spend break time!
14:00 The keynote was fantastic. Lots of great discussion on Twitter and the blog posts and analysis is started to get published.
11:00 I live tweet the keynote on a mega-🧵

it’s go time for @ajassy’s @awsreinvent keynote

stay tuned to this 🧵 for info and reactions. I’ve been to every re:Invent ever and while I’m older, slower, creakier, and grumpier…this is still my favourite conference in ☁️ by a mile

let’s do this!#reinvent #reinvent2020 pic.twitter.com/WcSQkW2Q3u
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) December 1, 2020
10:30 The keynote steam kicks off with a set from Zach Person. Very cool.

Monday, 30-Nov

23:45 AWS Late Night Week 1 wraps up with one new official launch, Amazon EC2 Mac Instances. Very interesting and cool. I’ll cover that a bit more in the Hot Takes post.

Here’s my tweet thread from the event. Click through to see it all…

. @mza kicking off @awsreinvent!#reinvent pic.twitter.com/y3IwWKPDws
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) December 1, 2020
23:00 AWS Late Night Week 1 kicks off the official events (beyond opening the platform). I’m live tweeting a lot of it…as long as I can stay awake.
17:00 The AWS platform official opens. I recorded a quick video with a walk through. Check it out.
14:00 So the timer on the main AWS page as expired but the on in the session catalog is still counting down with just under 3 hours left…hopefully something will happen then.
13:00 We’re still waiting on the “official” opening of the event platform. That happens in either 1 or 4 hours depending on which countdown timer is accurate. In the meantime, I was going to write up my thoughts on the us-east-1 outage from last week but fellow AWS Hero, Forrest Brazeal beat me to it.

Unless something changes systemically at AWS, we should expect future Kinesis Incidents, and we should expect them to be progressively bigger in scope and harder to resolve.

My analysis of AWS's postmortem and the path forward: https://t.co/X59VARqTmZ
— Forrest Brazeal (@forrestbrazeal) November 29, 2020
9:15 My first activity for the week (besides the flurry of blog updates) was to watch this excellent livestream by the AWS Serverless developer advocacy team. Hosted by Chris Munns and Julian Wood, they covered all of the #serverless announcements made in October and November leading up to the show.
08:00 Ugg….

so does @AWSreInvent start at 2:00pm pacific or 11:00am pacific?

the top is the footer on the main site, the bottom the session catalog#grr #devops #cloud ☁️ pic.twitter.com/uhMajoQEqI
— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) November 30, 2020
07:45 Logging into the session catalog and I’m greeted with the official countdown timer. AWS re:Invent 2020 starts in 9+ hours, around 2:00pm pacific time.

In the meantime, the session catalog hasn’t changed much but we do now have the “AWS On Air” section on the official site. I’ve updated the contents over at the The Ultimate Guide to re:Invent 2020
07:00 Every year, I start my re:Invent week off by sitting an exam in the first time slot offered. I’m not alone either. Starting around the second re:Invent, there has been a group of us that have met during that time slot each and every year.

It’s nothing formal or even really spoken of. We’ve always just gravitated to that time slot as like minded individuals. I know for me, it was a way to start off my week with a challenge (either by sitting a new beta exam or to renew an existing certification) and to remind myself that this conference is all about learning.

I’m a bit sad that I didn’t get to share that this year.