Hero guide: Introverts
Attending a large-scale conference like re:Invent can be overwhelming, especially for introverted people. This guide is designed to help you navigate re:Invent 2024 with ease, highlighting sessions that offer deep insights without overwhelming social interaction.
Jarosław Zieliński
AWS Community Hero
Attending a large-scale conference like re:Invent can be overwhelming, especially for introverted people like us. With countless sessions, networking opportunities, and crowded expo halls, it can be challenging to balance gaining valuable knowledge and preserving your energy. This guide has been curated with us in mind, highlighting valuable and engaging sessions that lack the pressure of large group interaction and that allow for quiet reflection.
Also, I know it's a bit oppositional to our nature, but I recommend walking around the show after the sessions to learn about the latest innovations in the industry. One-on-one contact with booth representatives gives you the opportunity to deepen your knowledge without the need for extensive social interaction. Finally, sharing your experiences in smaller, more intimate groups can be rewarding, or simply listening to others can offer new perspectives.
Bootcamp
TNC203 | Unleash the power of generative AI with Amazon Q
This bootcamp is intended for AWS Partners. The bootcamp explores the transformative power of Amazon Q, a generative AI–powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and complete tasks based on enterprise data and information. Gain hands-on experience with connecting to popular enterprise applications and document repositories, and learn how to use Amazon Q to securely and privately access accurate and relevant business insights. The bootcamp covers prompt engineering, output formats, administrative controls, security best practices, and recommendations for successful proof of concept projects. Become empowered to champion the value of Amazon Q within your organization, even without prior AWS expertise. You must bring your laptop to participate.
TNC305 | Become an expert on AWS observability services
This bootcamp is intended for AWS Partners. This bootcamp provides a deep dive into AWS observability services such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon Managed Grafana, and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. Come gain hands-on experience with features, possibilities, and solutions offered by the AWS observability suite. This bootcamp covers creating custom dashboards, using feature experimentation, and using logging and monitoring for troubleshooting. By the end, you have the ability to champion the value of AWS observability services, even without prior AWS expertise. You must bring your laptop to participate.
Breakout session
API306 | Integration patterns for distributed systems
Today’s applications are interconnected: they expose APIs, publish events, call third-party services, and externalize states. They must therefore address the fundamental challenges of distributed systems, such as out-of-order delivery, retries, idempotence, or partial failures. To balance those characteristics, architects have a range of options, including reducing the level of coupling through indirection, transformation, and asynchrony. In this session, learn about common design trade-offs for distributed systems and how to navigate them with design patterns, illustrated with real-world examples.
CMP301 | Dive deep into the AWS Nitro System
The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building block technologies—including hardware offload and security components built by AWS—that are powering the recent and future generations of Amazon EC2 instances with an ever-broadening selection of compute, storage, memory, and networking options. In this session, dive deep into the AWS Nitro System, review its design and architecture, explore new innovations in the Nitro platform, and see how it has made the seemingly impossible possible.
DOP203 | Governance and security with infrastructure as code
In this session, learn how to use AWS CloudFormation and the AWS CDK to deploy cloud applications in regulated environments while enforcing security controls. Find out how to catch issues early with cdk-nag, validate your pipelines with cfn-guard, and protect your accounts from unintended changes with CloudFormation Hooks.
DOP204 | GitLab Duo with Amazon Q: AI-driven DevSecOps for your SDLC
In this session, learn how the Amazon Q Developer differentiating agent capabilities for Gitlab Duo transform the developer experience by speeding up a range of tasks that support you as you research how to get started, evaluate system design, build secure and scalable applications, upgrade existing applications, and optimize application performance. Learn firsthand how capabilities for building, testing, reviewing, and transforming applications faster and more easily frees up teams to focus on experimentation and innovation.
STG203 | What’s new with AWS Backup
In the past year, AWS Backup has delivered new innovations to help you safeguard your data and audit your data protection posture. With new protection and recovery capabilities, AWS Backup continues to innovate for and delight over 130,000 customers protecting over 1.8 exabytes of application data. Join this session to explore the new features of AWS Backup; learn practical tips intended to help you secure, manage, test, and audit your data protection policies; and hear from your peers about how AWS managed data protection services offer defense in depth for data at rest and in transit.
SVS401 | Best practices for serverless developers
Do you want to take advantage of the full power of serverless architectures for your production workloads? Are you wondering how events can help your applications scale? Have you been trying to tune your applications for higher performance and lower cost? This session provides architectural best practices, optimizations, and useful shortcuts that experts can use to build secure, high-scale, and high-performance serverless applications.
TNC101 | Introduction to prompt engineering
In this session, you learn how to create and optimize prompts for a variety of generative AI models. First, this session covers the basics of foundation models (FMs), including a subset of FMs called large language models (LLMs). Then, the session covers the fundamental concepts of prompt engineering, such as the different elements of a prompt and some general best practices for using prompts effectively. Finally, the session provides information about basic prompt techniques, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting.
Chalk talk
GAM305 | How generative AI can boost developer productivity & player experience
In this chalk talk, learn how generative AI can boost developer productivity, enhance player experiences, and expand replayability by transforming content into dynamic, personalized in-game experiences. Discover how Amazon Q Developer empowers your team to focus on challenges, and explore how Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and Amazon Bedrock Agents can build a conversational Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to improve gameplay and engagement. This talk is ideal for game developers, designers, and AI enthusiasts looking to use generative AI for unforgettable gaming experiences.
IMP301-R | Your mission and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day [REPEAT]
Even with the best planning, hardware and software can fail, prized employees can leave, and the unexpected can disrupt operations. A disaster is often the time when it’s critical for mission-based workloads (such as credit union banking or fundraising solutions) to be available. How do you deliver on your mission when the unexpected happens? In this chalk talk, learn about ways to minimize workload impacts, including architectural practices, monitoring patterns, and gray failure detection, and discover how to build a culture of continuous resilience. Gain the knowledge necessary to deliver on your mission even when faced with a disaster.
KUB302-R | Strategies and best practices for securing containerized environments [REPEAT]
As part of designing any modern system on AWS, it is necessary to think about the security implications and practices that can affect your security posture. This chalk talk walks you through best practices for securing containerized environments on Kubernetes using a sample architecture. Learn about supply chain security, host security, runtime security, network security, and secrets management.
SVS315-R1 | Managing state in serverless applications [REPEAT]
Learn effective state management strategies for serverless computing with AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate in this chalk talk. Understand the challenges of traditional state management approaches when applied to ephemeral, event-driven serverless applications—and their impact on design and scalability. Discover how to use managed AWS services like Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon EFS to handle stateful data in serverless environments. Gain best practices and design patterns for managing state seamlessly in your serverless applications. Leave equipped with practical techniques for overcoming state management hurdles in serverless architectures.
Code talk
API310 | Build a meeting summarization solution with generative AI & serverless
In this code talk, see live coding of a serverless application for producing meeting summaries with generative AI. Learn how to orchestrate transcription using Amazon Transcribe and summarization with Amazon Bedrock, orchestrated with AWS Step Functions. Discover how to simplify and scale your application using event-driven techniques with Amazon EventBridge. Leave with practical skills for developing serverless generative AI solutions that streamline meeting insights through automated transcription and summarization powered by AI/ML services.
Closing comments
I recommend attending the sessions above to make the most of re:Invent 2024 and gain in-depth technical knowledge and practical insights. And remember, as someone famous once said, “Listening is as valuable as talking.” Hope to see you in Las Vegas!