If you made it to AWS re:Invent 2022, you no doubt had some memorable experiences. There were world class sessions, impressive announcements, and more fun than you could shake a stick at!
If you didn't make it, this is the recap that get you to the next one. In the meantime, let's catch you up on some of what you missed and how you can still dive in.
Werner's keynote
It would be too long a read to dive into all the keynotes. Instead, we'll give you the highlight reel for the keynote from Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon's VP and CTO. His keynote is notable, in particular, because it's always a must see. And the 2022 version was no exception! (No spoilers, but the beginning sketch is just delightful and so nerdy.)
As usual, Werner slays, but especially as he's talking about asynchrony in nature. It's a fascinating and perfect analogy for asynchronous, event-driven systems. Werner also has an absolutely brilliant piece about building loosely coupled systems here, which is a great example of architecture and insights into why this is so important.
One of the best parts of hearing from Werner is the history lesson and evolution of the architecture of services at AWS, in this case S3, their OG service offering along side EC2. We also get a blast from the past and insight into Amazon from the late '90s and how they were projecting the future of distributed computing.
Werner also shares some impressive stats about DynamoDB operating at scale. (Whenever someone says trillions, it's always a staggering number and you might be surprised to know that LaunchDarkly serves 20 trillion flags daily. And if you're DynamoDB curious, I suggest you watch this. DynamoDB's massive scale, single digit millisecond latency, and event integration capabilities make it a standout choice for noSQL implementations.)
Later on in the keynote, real world examples and implementations are helpful in seeing theory in practice. And Trust Pilot's Director of Engineering, Angela Timofte, does a great deep dive into Trustpilot's event-driven architecture.
Towards the end of Werner's talk, he gets into how the world is multidimensional. It's a fascinating dive into how we get from a 2D world in computing to better align with our real-world, which is decidedly multidimensional. On this topic, Werner goes far beyond rendering visually and reminds us how much is missing from our computer models when you consider body language, tone, and other cues humans receive from the world. Then there's a deep dive into AR and the technology to make it possible.
The Amazon Builders' Library
In Werner's keynote, he also touches on how the world is built on patterns and gives a shoutout to The Amazon Builders' Library, where you can learn from Amazon how the company builds and operates software. Werner highlights two articles and authors in particular:
- Claire Liguori, Principal Engineer at AWS, and her article "My CI/CD pipeline is my release captain" where Claire highlights how Amazon is able to deliver, deploy, and release a massive number of inflight changes. Claire offers a breakdown of best practices for CI/CD using AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS and she's brilliant!
- The other author Werner mentions is David Yanacek (who is also my other favorite speaker at re:Invent), and his article on "Using dependency isolation to contain concurrency overload." David has some exceptional articles on operating at scale, how to manage load, fairness in multitenancy, and survive extreme load. All worth a read, and check out his talks from re:Invent past (this is a favorite for me.)
Finally, this is just the confirmation that I needed to know that Werner and I are kindred spirits.
Session Roundup
Here are a set of links to catch you up on all the sessions and keynotes you might have missed:
- Our very own CTO, John Kodumal gave a presentation on Building and operating at scale with feature management. John jumps into how we dogfood at LaunchDarkly and the changes it has led to. John leads with some excellent dev team humor and unpacks what feature management is by exploring it through the lens of the relationship of deployment and release. He goes on to show how LaunchDarkly operates at such massive scale globally, including how LaunchDarkly uses AWS including a closer look at our architecture. And finally, he shows how LaunchDarkly can derisk and accelerate migrations, one of my favorite use cases!
- The Remarkable (Brian) Rinaldi with Charity Majors, the CTO of Honeycomb.io on Optimizing price performance with feature management and observability. #nospoilers, but this is just stunning: Honeycomb was able to expand workload usage by 10 times and reduce latency by 30%. In the talk, Charity explains how Honeycomb uses LaunchDarkly, with the icing on the cake, how they test new architectures with LaunchDarkly.
- Maybe my favorite talk I attended at re:Invent was about the intersection of Observability, Security, and Feature Management and how to contain the blast radius of security incidents with feature flags. Andrew Krug, Team Lead of Security Evangelism at Datadog, is a brilliant guy and shows an ingenious way to thwart attackers using Datadog's Cloud Workload Security product and how feature management and security go hand in hand.
- Check out more keynotes and leadership sessions here.
- And you can always find any session you're looking for via YouTube. The folks running the AWS Events Channel on YouTube have done a stellar job of grouping the sessions into playlists so whether you're searching for them alphabetically or by category, they've got you covered.
Announcements:
re:Invent always brings with it a slew of announcements, here's a list of some of the most exciting:
- Announcement #1: Step Functions Distributed Map - Orchestrate large-scale parallel workloads in serverless applications
- Announcement #2: AWS Application Composer - Visually design and build serverless applications quickly The best part? It's free: There is no additional charge for using AWS Application Composer.
- Announcement #3: Amazon EventBridge Pipes - Connects event producers and consumers in seconds. Amazon EventBridge Pipes helps you create point-to-point integrations between event producers and consumers with optional transform, filter and enrich steps.
- Announcement #4: Amazon CodeCatalyst - A unified software development service that makes it faster to build and deliver on AWS
Your serverlesspresso is ready
It's a rare person that doesn't need a regular caffeine infusion at re:invent to keep their energy up all day or recover from last night's indulgences! Of course AWS has the answer for you and no surprise that's powered by serverless, serverlesspresso!
Servlesspro is an interactive serverless application that allows you to order coffee from your phone. It consists of three front-end applications and a backend built primarily with AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge.
Let it slide
No trip to re:Invent is complete without miles and miles of walking, from venue to venue, or even just getting to and from your room and squeezing a meal in here and there. Thanks to Datadog, your weary feet and legs could catch a break from the endless steps, stairs, and escalators.
Rest assured, Datadog wasn't the only one having fun. LaunchDarkly connected with about 20% of the re:Inventers through our talks and our booth has hopping!
ICYMI, our "light speed tunnel" was a huge hit! The very top of our booth was legit too, with couches, chairs, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a tremendous view of the entire expo hall.
Oh, and it's worth noting too that the the AWS re:Invent swag game was on point in 2022! If you can't get enough of AWS re:Invent merch from your swag bag, AWS is ready to hook you up with their new merch shop!
If you missed re:Invent in 2022, we can't wait to see you at the next one!
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