So the main reason for me being here is the AWS seminar, that and Metallica playing on Monday. (no, I didn’t get tickets, they where like 300$ for standing)
Its a pretty huge setup, not only running out of the one single convention center but five of them. (Aria,Venetian,MGM Grand, Bellagio and Mirage) This year they where close to 50.000 attendees, so I can imaging the logistics that goes into it.
I met a woman while I was relaxing at the bar playing blackjack (as you do). She had seen my Norwegian flag on one of my bags and wanted travel tips for Sweden and Denmark (bot Norway, to expensive and nothing but fiords). She had the AWS reinvent as a full time job pretty much working 24/7 for the last months. It was its own organization with tons of people involved.. she was looking forward to some weeks of not talking to anybody and just zonig out in Stockholm.
I did a couple of sessions related to general network design, and the different possibilities you have with virtual gw’s, in Azure its a bit of a nightmare figuring out how to use the different ones, but AWS have a pretty good selection of different types that tou can use in combination or just as standalone.
I attended a session with Becky Weiss, and two other guys I cant remember the name of. She is pretty much the go-to-person for IAM in AWS, and togheter with the guy that was part of the first design of vpc they had the best session of the conference. this was probably also one of the few sessions where you got just networking people – so I think a lot of us in that room felt well at home. Finaly some ip addresses, routing and firewalling.
This is all about the cloud, and mainly focused towards developers. I am not an developer, and get a bit lost among all the coding talk that goes on everywhere. But they did have quite a few talks about networking and security that I signed up for, also there was a lot of talks surrounding migration plans and general information on how you go about getting started with cloud.
I would say that the talk by netflix “Yet another day for a Netflix network engineer” was pretty cool, those guys operate a massive enviroment and have tons of tools to keep it runnin. They did a great presentation.
There was a big expo area, bands playing, nice food and drinks served pretty much all the time. I didnt get any fancy stuff, just the regular pins and tshirts. But tons of nice people, and near all of them saying the same thing – choose AWS over AZURE. I guess they kinda need to say that, but I have to agree. Atleast from a networking point of view, AWS looks much more flexible and easy to get started eith. The VPC setup and design has documentation and examples that you can actually understand and there are great design documents in place for the large descissions.
I didnt get to put my company name on the board, cause I cant draw. And i skipped the closing show because I think EDM is pretty close to waterboarding. butt all in all a great conference.