Thoughts

Surprisingly this was my first AWS Summit, despite having been involved in cloud (mostly AWS) since 2014.

The core topics of this year's summit were very much focused on sustainability, security and AI; with the keynote covering a range of new services to facilitate development in these areas, such as Amazon Bedrock. Amazon Bedrock is a market-leading suite of new tools for building applications with generative AI on AWS.

The event was incredibly well attended, with the keynote auditorium quickly reaching capacity (4000 seats!). However, the keynote was projected across multiple theatres at the event to ensure all attendees were able to absorb the energy and the exciting news being delivered from the keynote stage.

Customers and colleagues who attended last year reported that this year seemed even busier. Unfortunately, that meant that some talks hit capacity very quickly and I couldn't attend one of the main sessions I wanted to (Well-Architected: Why So Many Get It Wrong) because it was far too popular and there weren't enough headphones available to listen to the speaker. The silver lining was that I got to go to (AMP: Empowering Manufacturing With Rapid IoT Data Insights) which actually was very insightful and relevant to our Green Custard workload(s).

The event organisers provided free food and drink throughout the day, including filter or barista coffee and soft drinks. I had a lovely tuna salad for lunch as well as many visits to the various coffee stands in between my travels to each talk I wanted to attend.

As our Customer Success Manager, Marketing Specialist and one of our Co-Founders were also at the event meeting clients, I got the opportunity to meet a number of our clients in person. It was great to meet face-to-face , get their take on the day and have a number of great conversations on a wide range of projects as well as topics from the day.

After my last session at 16:30 I took the opportunity to go around the various stands on offer and take part in some of the many activities, including the Free Kick Challenge which I apparently got on the leaderboard for.

At this point the networking event began, featuring free alcoholic beverages and a live band down on level 0. To wrap it up I took the time to visit some of my former colleagues to see how they were getting on and I believe a photo was taken which may or may not appear on one of the various social media platforms on offer.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and am very grateful to my team/directors for letting me attend.