Aety is an AWS partner and has therefore traveled to Re:Invent in Las Vegas. Here on Day 2 of the conference, things really get going.

We attended the keynote with the new CEO Adam Selipsky, who held together the story of people breaking new ground and how AWS is doing the same. A great and well-produced show, even though a rock concert at 8:30 in the morning is not an everyday occurrence.

The new services presented at the keynote are generally for specific use cases and further specialization. There were some interesting offerings in between, for example in relation to Business Intelligence (Quicksight with the ability to use “natural” language to query and visualize data), as well as a number of new serverless services to handle monitoring.

The day also included a talk on using AWS Kendra, which is a search service with connectors to e.g. Confluence. Kendra can help with better search results and presenting the result in context.

A personal favorite was Gregor Hohpe, who talked about IT architects and what skills are important in the role. Hophe’s view is that the most important thing is not knowledge of all AWS services, but rather the ability to communicate and convey the purpose systematically to different recipients. It is also important to work with good abstractions that can tell us something about what properties the system should have. Hohpe manages to communicate his messages with easy-to-understand metaphors and mental models, demonstrating his points about good architecture. Hohpe is an excellent communicator and it is highly recommended to get to know him.

AWS Day 2 ended at the Nevada Brew Works microbrewery, which brews great beer and serves excellent pizza – highly recommended.