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AWS re:Invent 2020, Week One

8 minute read | Last updated 2-Aug-2022 | An icon depicting a retail tag with a heart for 'favourite'    

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.

Index

View the start of the coverage

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

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:

  • 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:

  • 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!

    Fornite vs Galactus

  • 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-

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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….

  • 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.