Day 2 of re:Invent 2023 has come and gone and it was personally my best day yet. By the numbers, I’m at the halfway point with my two busiest days ahead. Let’s get right to my recap as it’s filled with all kinds of fun interactions.
Let’s dig into Day 2 of AWS re:Invent 2023.
Day 2
Just a quick recap, if you missed Day 0 or Day 1, no worries. Head on over to those links to gain some insights into my first two days. Don’t worry, this recap will still be waiting for you when you are done!
Alright, onto Day 2!
Keynote
The Tuesday morning keynote with Adam Selipsky is usually a big mixture of releases, statistics and partnership updates. It’s sort of a blend of all of the keynotes wrapped into one and it goes for 2 1/2 hours and is jammed packed.
I can’t possibly cover all of the updates and honestly, you can find those on the internet. I’ll just hit the ones I thought were interesting and give some lightweight takes on why I was excited or where I think things fell a little short.
Generative AI
There has been a lot of talk and discussion around this area all week. Rightly so, as it’s at the forefront of most customers, developers, leaders and consumers minds. My overarching theme for what I heard is this.
AWS built security into its products and tools first and foremost. This is a comforting thought, as some of the data that we want to use with AI is personal and perhaps even sensitive and I don’t want this mixing with other’s data. As someone who is still skeptical of the power we are wielding with AI, this makes me feel somewhat better. Honestly, the genie can’t go back into the bottle. But I’ll leave you with this thought. Many in the social space took and take advantage of us as consumers through the use of AI and the people building those algorithms were super smart. By lowering the bar for AI’s usage, will that draw in those who look to exploit that power? Probably. So safety, security, fairness and resiliency of these capabilities must be paramount.
Onto the key releases.
Q
AWS Q is the neatest and most ready-to-use thing I saw today. It’s essentially an already capable AI platform/entity that can learn from your specific contextual information. For instance, take your HR handbook at work. Give Q access to that, and employees no longer need to check with HR about a vacation policy. Or how to take PTO. Simple a simple use-case but honestly amazingly powerful. I have an idea or 10 about how to get started with Q and will have a sample at some point soon.
Bedrock Guardrails
Back to security and AI. Bedrock now has Guardrails. These controls should help with access and the content that is returned from the AI platform. Imagine a scenario where your model was built and accidentally spit out hate speech. With Guardrails this content will be removed. Another example is PII or PHI redaction or removal. I like this feature a lot because it gives some control over output.
S3 Express One Zone
A new storage class for S3 was introduced. This class is built specifically to deliver the highest performance and lowest latency among all S3 storage classes. For me, I think Athena and Glue when running queries against big data workloads that have been processed but are just stored in S3. Also, this might help speed up certain ETL workflows.
Expos and Dev Lounge
I intentionally left a lot of space in my day to see if I could do some chatting with others in the community at the Dev Lounge. This hunch paid off as I was able to connect with over 10 people that I know online and respect but had never met in person. Those included, AWS Developer Advocates, Heros, Community Builders and honestly other builders just at the conference.
I had such a great time networking and meeting people that I doubled down and spent time after lunch doing more of the same. This year at re:Invent I’m valuing time with others over specific sessions and courses. I feel amazingly blessed to have access to so many smart and friendly people that the questions or thoughts I have can be asked in real-time via Slack or Discord, but the conversations I had today in real life can’t be replicated.
There were too many topics to list but my favorite chats were about
- Monolithic vs single purpose Lambdas
- The new Rust SDK that is GA
- Bedrock and Lambda
- Sharing stories about friends who have passed away.
Again, I feel so lucky to have this opportunity.
More Connections
Later in the afternoon, I spent some time with my favorite Serverless Caching solution, Momento. Khawaja Shams is someone that I deeply respect and was looking forward to meeting this week. Happy to say we made that happen before the big party tomorrow night. On top of meeting with Khawaja, I got to hang out with others on the Momento team to chat about the software and get some insight into their re:Invent experience.
Community Builder Mix
Jason Dunn and the CB community team put on a wonderful night of mingling, mixing and feasting. The theme for today was conversation.
While eating and drinking we were treated by a visit from Jeff Barr. I was able to spend 5 or 10 minutes talking to him and he’s just the nicest and most genuine person. Sometimes when you meet people in person that you respect from a distance, you are disappointed. And sometimes you meet them and you are surprised that they are even nicer than you thought they were. Jeff was that person and layer in humility as well.
I also was able to meet Corey Quinn and have a good discussion about Serverless in Life Sciences. He interviewed me more than I did him, which was cool. Again, he’s one of those people who has a tremendous following but also was super nice and approachable.
Nightcap
If this wasn’t enough, I closed at the night at a Cloudflare party at the Cosmopolitan. I had 22K steps for the day and figured why not get to 25K which I managed to do.
Day 2 ++
Up next … I’ve got a busy day planned enjoying another Keynote and hanging out with Momento tomorrow night. I think I’ve got a couple of sessions reserved so I’ll be mixing those in as well!
If you at re: Invent and would like to meet up, here’s my contact card. Drop me an email or text me. I’d love to chat!
Until next time and happy building!
