What is AWS and AWS re:Invent?
For those who haven’t heard of it before, AWS stands for Amazon Web Services and is a subsidiary of Amazon. AWS itself is a cloud services platform handling everything from file hosting and traffic routing to machine learning and databases. Since 2012 AWS has hosted the AWS Re:Invent conference every year to announce new product offerings, certify developers on the AWS platform, and to provide top-tier training to developers of all experience and career levels. (Raygun provides support for AWS Code Deploy and AWS Lambda.)
AWS re:Invent 2016 continued to address the tremendous growth of attendees over previous years by increasing the number of sessions and adding additional venue locations. Even with those changes the conference was still packed to the brim with attendees clamouring to get access to standing-room-only sessions that had been booked solid week in advance. Despite the large amount of attendees and sessions, everyone was still overwhelming friendly, welcoming, and up for a quick chat about anything tech related.
The conference at a glance
The conference started off on Monday and Tuesday with a hackathon, a Alexa skills development competition, and numerous training sessions/bootcamps for attendees. The Global Partner Summit was also held on Tuesday for anyone who was part of the AWS Partner Network. Unlike the normal conference sessions, the Global Partner Summit sessions were geared towards executives, sales managers, and other technical professionals.
The main portion of the conference opened up Wednesday November 30th with a keynote by Andy Jassey, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. The rest of the days were filled with technical sessions, hands-on workshops, an amazing exhibit hall filled with sponsors, and continuing AWS certification tests being conducted. From 6:30 AM till late in the evening, you’d find the convention center halls at the Venetian and Mirage hotels teeming with energy as attendees rushed between session locations and took brief breaks in the halls to plan their next block of time.
Notable sessions
While the wait list lines to get into sessions were quite long and the sessions themselves were booked up full before the conference, I still managed to spend some time soaking up all the knowledge AWS provided. Among my favorite sessions were:
Serverless Authentication and Authorization: Identity Management for Serverless Architectures
In this session Justin Pirtle and Jim Tran showed attendees how to leverage serverless architecture to manage user identities, work with social media identity providers, and integrate with existing corporate directory systems. Techniques featuring Amazon Cognito, AWS API Gateway, and AWS Lambda, and AWS Identity and Access Management were taught using real world examples.
I’ve worked on applications before where legacy user authentication and authorization code were so interwoven into the backend that it was often more work to try to remove them than it was to just monkey patch around their shortcomings as needed. However, using the techniques from this session I can easily see a much more robust and maintainable system for handling these important yet time-consuming portions of an application.
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