The AWS Summit Sydney 2019 is on 30 April (Innovation Day) and the 1st and 2nd May at the ICC Darling Harbour Sydney. I am excited about attending and am looking forward to drilling into a few things this year.
People
At every one of these events, the value comes from the people at them. This is the presenters, the other attendee’s and even the people staffing the booths (which I am usually one of). Hopefully catching up with old friends and maybe making some new ones.
But mostly just talking to people about what they are doing with cloud, their journey and how it has been going. It is exciting to hear what people are doing and generally inspiring to see the innovation going on.
Presenters I am looking forward to seeing:
- Olivier Klein from AWS- He consistently delivers keynotes and demo’s that I enjoy. Probably has a lot to do with the technology he is demoing though, which is usually brand new emerging tech (AR, AI etc).
- Rob James, CTO @ Qantas - I am interested in what he may have to say during the Innovation Day. He has a good job history and has worked in some challenging places. Listening to his thoughts around innovation and the future should be thought provoking.
- Dr Jordan Nguyen - I haven’t heard him speak before. However he did his degree in Biomedical Engineering and advocates for AI, robotics and technology for improving the lives to people with physical disabilities. Also, he invented a mind-controller smart wheelchair (retina directed with cameras and computer vision to assist with navigating)- which sounds fascinating.
Topics
My key areas of interest this year -
- Hybrid Cloud - So much is happening in this space at the moment so I want to see what I can pick up and follow up. AWS Outpost, VMware Cloud on AWS, Federated Kubernetes clusters, Enhancements around Transitive networking (Transit Gateway) etc
- Kubernetes - Anything around this space is interesting to me, particularly info about challenges at scale.
- AI - I love the idea and potential use-cases around AI particularly Deep Learning and Neural Networks, so anything I can dig into in this space will be exciting
- Serverless - I like to see how this has been going. I have been messing around with Lambda and Aurora Serverless, and I love the idea of automatically scaling and cost efficiency that comes from these fully managed services.
Sessions
There are too many sessions I want to attend this year with way too much conflict as usual. But the below are my must attend followed by my probably will attend sessions (I may end up changing it up depending on how the days are going)
Must Attend
An Inconvenient Truth - This is the Versent session. Hopefully it isn’t a sales pitch and does live up to the description. These guys are very very good at actually implementing AWS Cloud for customers, so I am keen to hear the realities from their perspective.
Systems of Record in the Cloud - My largest customer is in the Financial Services industry - so it makes sense I attend this one.
A Data Driven Roadmap to Enterprise AI Strategy - This is a Contino sponsored session, so again I hope less sales pitch and more content (which I expect it will be based on my experience with the Contino guys). I am looking forward to hearing their thoughts on AI.
Headfirst and All in - Autotraders’s Learnings on Adopting Kubernetes at Speed with Vibrato - so this is another sponsored session - but customer journeys are typically interesting and Autotrader went from no containers to full deployed k8s in months (at least according to the brief)
Lessons From Officeworks on Optimising Persistent Storage on AWS - This is all about how Officeworks uses NetApp in cloud to optimise their workflows for dev/test and reduce their overall AWS Storage costs. This is another sponsored session (and sponsored by my employer too) - but as I said in the session above, customer journeys are typically more interesting.
Probably Will Attend
Running Lean: Performance yet Cost Optimised - sounds interesting in general - most likely smart product choice and architecture to get the best at a low cost (serverless, event driven etc)
Best Practices for Migrating Databases to the Cloud - A big part of Hybrid Cloud is taking parts of your workloads and transitioning them to cloud, so I think Database migrations might be interesting - particularly alternatives to the major commercial SQL type DB’s (Oracle and SQL Server).
Improving Customer Experience with Amazon Connect – The AI driven Contact Centre
Bringing Cloud to the Edge - All about Outposts for me.
When I am not in sessions, I will likely be at or around the NetApp booth (most likely working) if you want to come say hi! We will be demoing some cool things we do with cloud, k8s and data.