So I’m just back from the AWS Summit London 2019. The capital of the UK is one of my favorite cities in the whole world. I visited it in numerous occasions but this was only the second time I attended the AWS Summit that is held here every year in May.
Overall it was a well organized event, however if I compare it to last year I could notice some things that were disappointing but also some things that improved. If I look at the good things than I can certainly say that at a technical level the breakout sessions were better then last year, with more content and better presenters. Some of the sessions that I attended and I really liked include:
- CI/CD on AWS held by Danilo Poccia, Principal Evangelist, AWS – this session covered CI/CD pipelines in the context of AWS, including such interesting topics as the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), CodePipeLine and CodeBuild
- Are you well architected ? held by Philip Fitzsimons, Senior Manager Well-Architected, AWS – this session focused on the Well Architected Tool and how can you make sure that your application follows the latest industry best practices.
- Serverless functions deep dive held by Danilo Poccia, Principal Evangelist, AWS – this was as it’s title says a deep dive on serverless functions, the SAM CLI and a cool case study on Comic Relief’s serverless journey
The summit had also an expo part where AWS partners had lots of goodies for their prospective customers. First of all you could get your questions answered about their products and offerings, secondly you could get your hands on some swag or other free stuff. For example you could win a drone or you could get a t-shirt for free in exchange for letting them scan your badge. Learning from my re:Invent experience I mostly skipped the badge scanning in exchange for free stuff because I didn’t want to repeat the wave of marketing email that I got after re:Invent and from which I still couldn’t fully unsubscribe.
Another great thing is that they had an “Ask an Architect” area at the expo were AWS solutions architects answered to questions about most of their services (if you had something specific to ask). I also couldn’t miss the certification lounge were certified individuals <brag> like me 🙂 </brag> could get some goodies and could sit down & relax having a good coffee.
The less positive parts of the Summit were the lack of a proper wifi network and the failure of the data cellular network. Most of the times I couldn’t get online because as no official wifi network was available most of the 12.000+ guests used the cellular network which become saturated at times so it was unresponsive.
Ok. Enough with the compaints. I’ll post down here the video of the keynote so you can watch it if you want and maybe you will decide to join an AWS Summit that it’s happening near your. I think that it is a good experience for anyone working with AWS.