AWS re:Invent — Niners share their experience
Lazar Veljovic, DevOps Architect @ Levi9
1. Levi9: a proud AWS partner
Back in 2016, a few enthusiastic people from Levi9 decided to start our journey towards AWS partnership. With no certified people at that moment and practically just a bit of experience with AWS it was an unexpected journey. Moving forward to 2022, more than 120 certified people, 2 AWS competences, 1 partnership program and soon to become Premier Tier partners. We almost succeeded in all, however our ambition is to achieve even more.
2. AWS re:Invent — keynote speeches recap
After many successful years of our partnership with AWS, this year we had a great opportunity to visit AWS re:Invent for the first time. Re:Invent 2022 was all about data and sustainability.
Keynote on the 2nd day presented by Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS confirmed the importance of data and sustainability these days. Amazon OpenSearch offered as fully Serverless, Aurora zero-ETL integration with Redshift and Redshift integration with Apache Spark were just a few of the important announcements during this keynote. Most probably the biggest star was AWS DataZone, a service that helps customers to share, discover and govern usage of data across the organization.
We were amazed by the fact that AWS has more than 600 different instance types available. However, they’ve announced a new instance type powered by Graviton3 processor with 200Gb/s network bandwidth making it ideal for network intensive workloads.
AWS has big plans when it comes to renewable energy as well. By 2025 their plan is to become 100% powered by renewable energy and by 2030 to be water positive which means they will return to community more water than they’re using.
Keynote presented by Swami, VP of Data and Machine Learning, for sure confirmed the importance of data and technologies built around it. Focus was on tools for every workload, performance at scale, removal of heavy lifting as well as reliability and scalability. Several new features were announced with a goal to fulfill the above, like Amazon Athena for Apache Spark, Elastic clusters for Document DB and Amazon SageMaker ML support for geo spatial data.
Between keynotes and various other sessions, we were amazed by re:Invent organization and logistics for more than 50.000 attendees. It was interesting to see how many people are needed to support all the events happening around the conference. Like, 20 waiters standing in a huge restaurant during lunch and pointing out where you should sit in order to optimize availability of the seats, or around 50 people checking your badges and pointing directions for the masses during keynote speeches.
The last day’s keynote was held by AWS CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels who gave a great speech about world being asynchronous and how engineers should think in that way while implementing software. A few new announcements were made, like Amazon CodeCatalyst, EventBridge Pipes, Application Composer as well as Step Functions Distributed Map during this speech. The main takeaway is most probably EventBridge Pipes which helps with connecting various data sources and simplifying implementation of event-driven applications.
3. Learning from AWS partners @AWS re:Invent
AWS gives a lot of attention to their partners and during the conference we could hear many great stories and achievements from many companies. Even more, there was a keynote dedicated to partners where many partners had a chance to present their solutions. Most impressive was financial company from Brazil with 10 million accesses per day, 2500 microservices, 1 million API calls per minute which concentrates 10% of all payments in Brazil. They managed to scale from 100.000 customers to more than 20 million customers in just five years! Their example taught us that re-engineering of complete platform and moving it to the “elastic” cloud environment gives a great opportunity for large scaleups. AWS Certified people were also recognized during the whole conference. We’ve managed to meet many inspiring people, some of them having all 12 AWS certificates, which is definitely a great success.
4. AWS re:Invent takeaway — Levi9 is on the right track
By meeting some of the great attendees as well as AWS employees, we’ve realized that we as Levi9 are doing great things and moving in the right direction. It was an amazing experience to compare us to some of the biggest AWS customers and partners. Even though we aren’t the biggest partners compared to all the giants that were there, nor the biggest customer of AWS, our strategy and our goals are leading us into a bright future. So, who knows, with enthusiastic Levi9 people and great energy, we might become one of those giants in the future. 😊
After all, re:Invent is a great place to be. With all the sessions that you can learn from, opportunities to meet experts from all over the world, it is also a nice place to have a bit of fun as well.