AWS re:Invent 2023 brings Tech Week to Las Vegas

A busy Venetian Resort in Las Vegas greeted me on the night before AWS re:Invent 2023. From Monday 27th November, there was a week of qualitative keynotes, talks, and events of all sizes taking place to delight attendees. AWS re:Invent 2023 had 50,000 in-person attendees, hundreds of thousands of virtual attendees, and over 2,000 technical sessions.

AWS re:Invent 2023 reviewed, up close and in person

To give you a flavour of the in-person experience, I devoted day-2 to gaining a feel for what the attendee experience is like. The amount of leading technology vendors, pivotal talks and announcements, along with technological knowledge shares was an impressive sight to behold. Stalls and branded stores from Datadog to Databricks and beyond transformed the Venetian Resort into a premiere tech hub for AWS re:Invent. Do note that’s before I headed to the tech Expo, where the number of qualitative exhibitors was so large, I struggled to find an absent industry leader in the many fields represented.

My morning started out before 07:15hrs with a 10-abreast queue flowing in to the Keynote auditorium by the thousands. There was a band playing beforehand, who were rocking the filling auditorium before Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, made several exciting technology announcements about AWS’s continuing partnership journey to an enthralled crowd.

My walk-around then moved onwards. The Content Hub, composed of 6 normally sized auditoriums plus a Salesforce exhibition, was in a hall that could be called a small conference center. For my stay there, data was the theme with the first talk on ETL and data pipelines, and then a fascinating AWS talk on Project Kuiper.

This talk was a spectacular announcement of AWS’s project to bring public internet to regions of the world that currently do not have internet access. AWS have recently launched the first of their near earth satellites. 2 satellites in space make a start to an epic story for public and private internet access through this new and expansionary service. Early adopter testing will begin in the latter half of 2024.

After a fascinating chat with Alissa from Slack on the platoform’s architectural improvements, which includes new AI features, I was then off via the lower level to a tech talk by Datadog; and their guest speaker, Taggart. They had some useful insights on how Datadog helps their observability around their digital products in the FinTech area.

This led to the evening, and a 45 minute bus ride to Vu Las Vegas (LED Studio). Samira Bakhtiar from AWS was host for the evening session. She introduced Scott Gutterman, SVP Digital Operations, with the PGA Tour. Scott talked about his exploration into the adoption of AI to enhance the viewer and the player experience around PGA Tours. Scott also cited AWS services as a key ingredient in their digital success.

Next interview by Samir was with Nikola Todorovic, Co-Founder and CEO of Wonder Dynamics, along with Gretchen Bibby, Director of Visual Computing with AWS. Nikola, as a budget movie maker, talked about the prohibitive costs of moviemaking with FX involvement, which gave birth to his focus on creating a cost-effective alternative. This was the founding sentiment behind Wonder Dynamics.

His technological (FX) breakthroughs to scale for high end projects; which have hit the big screen over recent years are a testament to how Scott could scale his business. Gretchen’s team at AWS were a key part of this success story!

2 days later, I sat in on a talk, and a very moving recount by Mariusz Kaczmarek, COO of Privatbank Ukraine. He recalled this tech team telling him at the start of the Russian invasion that a migration into the cloud could not complete in time. 43 days later, and after the horrors of war literally visited them, they completed the migration into AWS with nothing to lose. He cited that the support of the Ukrainian Government made the impossible possible. Mariusz’s team did the rest!

I can see AWS re:Invent continuing to build bridges between business and technology for many years to come. Given the innovative edge that AWS has obviously kept over the years, the extensions across governments and into space and beyond make this conference one to watch out for.

By John Mulhall @johnmlhll | john@maolte.ie is a writer with Irish Tech News for over 7 years and also a Founder, Writer, and Engineer with Maolte Technical Solutions Limited. You can learn more about John and his IT services company at https://maolte.ie.

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