AWS Summit 2018 – Recap

This was my second year attending Amazon Web Services Summit. Both times I have headed down to Chicago for a few days to network, learn, and get excited about new AWS developments.

This year, the summit was scheduled for only one day. Being that the summit started early in the morning I decided I was going to head down early. By happenstance, I was invited to attend a workshop put on by Dynatrace. 

Dynatrace is a logging and monitoring platform built inside AWS. It integrates with nearly any piece of technology you can think of. For me, monitoring is important for the web servers that I manage for my customers. In this workshop, we learned how to create a continuous development pipeline. Essentially what this means is that we deployed our application which had various staging and production environments that Dynatrace was able to monitor and ensure successful deployments.

After the workshop, Dynatrace hosted a lovely rooftop cocktail party. Thanks again for the invitation!

The summit began early the next morning. I spent the morning visiting some vendor booths and getting the lay of the land before attending the keynote.

This years keynote was centered around the concept of “Builders”. Amazon wants all of its customers to be builders. By that, they mean that they want us to explore and be curious with their platform. When we see a problem they want us to solve it within Amazon Web Services. While this concept is great fundamentally, I do believe that is catered more towards developers and people that code rather than infrastructure gurus like myself. Nevertheless, I still found the concept compelling in my adventures.

The day continued with various sessions. I spent a good amount of time working through the business executive track which focuses on migrations and security. 

Overall the summit was good. I did miss the two day format. By the end of the day it was a very long day of travel and learning. 

If you or someone you know is interested in cloud computing, AWS Summit is a great place to get excited about all the possibilities!