I was randomly walking to grab a bite when I saw an ad for AWS Summit on a bus. It turns out it was starting the very next day. I thought “Why not? It’s free.” It could be a good way to meet some new people. I then spent the next hour trying to make sense of the types of AWS sessions there are and which ones I wanted to attend.

Here are my thoughts on each type I attended.

1. Interactive Training

I attended the Intro to AWS Lambda and Working with Amazon ECS sessions. These are guided beginners tutorials. They provided computers each with a dual monitor setup. There was a technical instructor who would guide and explain each part of the tutorial. The instructors I had were well spoken and did an excellent job at conveying the concepts. There were also other technical instructors who could help you at any point.

I benefited a lot from these because I had never used these AWS services. If you already have experience with the topic, these are probably not for you.

2. Workshop

For the workshop, I attended SVS401: From Serverful to Serverless Java. This is a 400 level session which means it is an “Expert” level. I didn’t find it too particularly difficult since I have used Java and Spring Boot in the past. If you are a developer, I wouldn’t worry too much about the expert level rating.

In this session, a speaker introduces the topic and then lets everyone work through the lab at their own pace. The lab involves reading instructions, interacting with the AWS Console, and copying and pasting text into specific areas.

For this session specifically, it focused on how to take a spring boot application and deploy it to an AWS Lambda. Then it explains how to optimize the memory usage and cold start times. I learned how to use SnapStart, a tool that lets you cache the runtime state of the application, and PowerTuner which helps you figure out the ideal memory allocation for a Lambda. It also compares rewriting the application in Quarkus and Micronaut. Lastly, there was also a comparison with using GraalVM. Overall, it was a cool lab and it provided ample time to complete the entire lab.

3. Lightning Talk

These are quick slideshow presentations. I went to the one called Insights into Billing. It was in the EXPO area which was why they provided these headphones to listen to the speaker. I didn’t use them. I didn’t find this talk very useful as it wasn’t technical and it was labeled as such. The AWS events app labels who the expected audience is and that is super important because you don’t want to be a developer listening to a talk for managers.

4. Dev Chat

Basically the same as a Lightning Talk but I guess it could be longer. I attended the Scaling Development With AI: The Infinitely Scalable Team. In essence, the speaker explained how AI can make developer teams more productive with AI. The only point I remember was that AI can help with monitoring. I could’ve taken notes, but it wasn’t that interesting.

The speaker went overtime as I don’t think English was his native language. I ended not being able to go to the Amazon DevOps Culture session because it filled up by the time I made it. Oh well.

5. Chalk Talk

These are slideshow presentations with a whiteboard for the presenters to draw on. They involve audience participation.

I attended Thinking Serverless which was about how to architect a serverless application. People from the audience contributed and provided some tasks they wanted to know how to make serverless. The teacher who asked what would the “Hello World” architecture look like for students was helpful. They translated the 3 tier web architecture to API Gateway -> AWS Lambda -> RDS. I spoke to the speakers afterwards and they were super helpful.

I also attended Is Your Serverless Application Ready For Production. Basically, the speakers encourage the audience to think about what features they need for different “Pillars” of production ready applications. Stuff like security, reliability, etc. It wasn’t too interesting to me.

6. Breakout Session

Another slideshow presentation. There is no audience participation for this one. I attended one on security but I made the same mistake as the lightning talk as this one was meant for IT professionals. I shortly left after arriving

7. Builder’s Session

These are self-paced tutorials where you sat at a table of about 6-8 people and had an instructor ready for any questions. I went to Getting Started with Serverless Patterns and Building Secure Serverless Applications. These labs are decently made (and probably cost money to do outside of an AWS event) but I was a bit drained when I did them. They quickly became copy and paste rituals instead of active learning. Additionally, they were only allotted 60 minutes which was not enough to complete any of them because you spent the first few minutes listening to the instructor and then setting up your environment. The one about security had 12 modules!

Expo

Not a session, but it deserves its own section. Basically like a career fair where multiple companies have their own little space to promote their products. There is swag available. Unfortunately, I failed my goal of acquiring a tech t-shirt. The best I got were some cloudflare socks. I guess tariffs hit hard?

Also, in the section for AWS training and certification there was a gaming section for AWS Card Builder. I didn’t play but it looks a cool gamified way of learning cloud architecture. I might look deeper into it.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

1. Do not eat the indian chicken thing with quinoa. It does not taste good. The chicken bowl with noodles is way better. At least it was all complimentary.
2. If there is an event you really want to attend, get there early.
3. Double check who the target audience for each event is. For me, if it wasn’t for developers/engineers it was boring.
4. I met someone who also attends GMU and we got along nicely. It is more fun to walk around the expo with friends.
5. Networking can be tough but rewarding. I spoke to a lot of people the first day and not so many the second day. My best advice is to start talking to people near you as soon as you arrive at a session. So don’t sit where there are no people.
6. The whole event is an ad for AWS. It makes you feel that AWS and the cloud are super important. The free training you can get also feels nice. I now desire to get an AWS certification, but I have no idea how long that feeling will last.

Final Thoughts

I ran into a project manager I knew and did not expect it at all. I know he works on the IT side of things and I guess it would make sense for him to be there. He mentioned he was going to cloud governance and FinOps related sessions.

Going into this event, I naively thought it would be full of developers and software engineers. In reality, tech (and AWS) is so much broader than that. People from every sector attended. That is why there are so many different sections and even some that I found “boring.” But that’s okay. Tech is for everyone.

I’m glad I went, and I plan to go again next year.