It’s hard to believe AWS re:Invent was an event of only 2,000 attendees just six years ago. Now in 2018, we joined a crowd of over 55,000+ customers, partners, and vendors in Las Vegas to discuss the latest AWS cloud innovations and embrace other emerging technologies.
The main sessions, including Global Partner Summit and keynote sessions presented by Andy Jassy and Dr. Werner Vogels, were hosted at The Venetian hotel. Each session was extremely well attended with people arriving over an hour early to claim their seat. Who could blame them while you battle seating with 55,000 other attendees? The caliber of topics and content was extremely impressive as they introduced what’s next for AWS cloud technology. The keynote presentation led by CEO Andy Jassy was, as always, an impressive session. Not shockingly, he chose this platform to communicate dozens of significant news announcements, placing a particular emphasis on dedicating AWS to improving the lives of us “builders.” As for CTO Dr. Werner Vogels’ keynote session on Thursday, he mentioned a data point that was pretty astounding–AWS has such an active user community that at this point 95 percent of AWS features and services are based on customer feedback. Along with, about 59% of all Microsoft workloads run on AWS, stat coming out of independent researcher IDC.
A more detailed recap of the main sessions including the top announcements and key takeaways are available in the articles below:
During the show, we asked fellow attendees about their likes, dislikes during the event and what they hoped to gain from the countless sessions and networking opportunities spread throughout the week.
Here are some of the responses we received:
- “Our goal is to create a completely resilient AWS environment with zero chance of business disruption when something breaks or a system fails. There are ways to become 100% confident in the system and I hope to gain more insight into this during the upcoming session about how to leverage containers to test resilience.“–VP of Global Manufacturer, first time attendee.
- “Conversations about the cloud are definitely more mature this year. Everyone has learned the importance of monitoring and managing AWS costs, but now the focus is on how to better optimize your cloud environment and accelerate your journey leveraging the products and services already available.”—CIO, SaaS provider on AWS.