AWS Summit 2017

The New York AWS Summit of 2017

In case you weren't aware, Amazon has more than a massive online marketplace and a talking cylinder: they also have one of the most popular cloud service systems in the form of Amazon Web Services (AWS).


Amazon promote's AWS often by holding events and conferences throughout the year in various locations, so that developers (and their managers) can take a look at all the different products offered by AWS and find/learn about the ones that best suit their business needs. 

​
Amazon decided to hold an event in New York. And we got an email allowing us to register. 

Registration was simple.

​Just like that, we were invited to go to a free event hosted by Amazon. Was it going to be good? I didn't know, I just wanted to learn about their services and see some useful live demos. 

And so, the day of the event came. I took the train to the city and met my friend, and we walked to the convention center.

​My friend Nick (to the right) and I (left) took a selfie by the sign. Indisputable proof that we attended.

A look inside.

The line to pick up our registration badge was crazy long. ​I guess because it was a free event, everyone decided to attend?
​So like. Where do we go?

The line to get into the keynote presentation room was wayyyyy too long. I think they were checking bags. (I was stupid enough to bring one.)
We went to a mini theater where they projected the keynote onto some screens for everyone to watch. 

(Couldn't I have stayed home and watched the stream from my computer, lol?)
Not gonna lie. The presentation was boring. 
But they had actual food after the keynote ended. For a free event?!

Not too bad. (I mean, I'm picky so I didn't really eat, but it looked decent. Especially for free food.)
​
​So we decided to explore more. It turns out that...

There was an open space where there were a few booths and some smaller presentations going on. These were by individual companies that had AWS products and wanted to promote their businesses to people who used AWS.

These booths actually gave out some free goodies. (I'll show you a picture of the swag I got at the end of this article.) 

To be 100% honest, I was in my quiet_so_lets_learn mood, not my talkative_and_chatty mood so we only visited a few booths. But it was CROWDED! Tons of people were checking the stuff out. (If I had known that I was going to make a blog post for the event, I'd have spoken more sincerely to each of the vendors to find out what they did.)

Nick and I played a game. I lost. He won a mini drone. RIGGED. (But that company (Scylla I believe) gave me a T-shirt that I actually wear, so lol it's all good. They also had the longest line, we waited for like 45 minutes!)

We went to a different area of the convention center to see some individual demo/presentations to try and learn in-depth about the AWS products. 

Errr...to be honest, none of the presentations that we went too actually taught us too much...
We went to the booth area one more time to see if we missed anything.

Some of these booths had cool games. For this game, there were a bunch of keys in a container. Everyone on line took a key, and tried to open the locked cage. If they opened it, then they won the drone that was inside. Pretty inventive games to be honest.

And so we saw everything we wanted too, so we decided to go home. 

I got three t-shirts and three fidget spinners. (They actually gave away free fidget spinners!) (Thanks to Scylla, Turbonomic, Cyxtera, and RedisLabs for the swag.)

The event was...not what I expected. I expected a quick keynote explaining simply what AWS was doing and how to best use it (a brief demo). Then I expected individual talks that demo'ed how to use AWS for specific projects. That didn't really happen at all. The keynote was too businessy, long, slow paced, and boring. Some individual product presentations were better than others, but I wouldn't call them the best demos ever. I didn't learn anything about the products themselves or learn how I could do what the presenters were doing if I went home and opened AWS up myself. So in total, the event wasn't helpful to me, as a developer.

However, the event wasn't bad to attend, and I hope to attend it in 2017, as well.

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