My First AWS Summit

On Thursday, May 2, I braved the Atlanta traffic (and pollen count) to attend my first ever Amazon event. AWS Summit -- think of it as a "lite" version of the company's annual re:Invent conference and held in major cities -- whets the appetite of folks in the AWS ecosystem until re:Invent in December. This may not be the flagship event for Amazon, but just like the behemoth company, the AWS Summit was nothing short of impressive in size: over 4,500 attendees, 60+ exhibitors, 45+ sessions and workshops, and occupied Building C of the Georgia World Congress Center.

By the way, the event was free. Breakfast was free, lunch was free, and open bar at the concluding networking reception. Onsite WiFi was free and surprisingly reliable. Bonus: there was a live DJ spinning tunes in the main corridor the whole time (free!).

And that's why AWS has and continues to dominate: you cannot beat free. Microsoft and Google are the only two other close-but-not-really competitors in terms of size and revenue. Truth be told, however, tech companies have always exerted dominance by giving away products and services for free, just think back to Gmail and Internet Explorer. Amazon just took a page from the ol' tech playbook and had impeccable timing to ride the cloud computing wave early on.

However, founder Jeff Bezos deserves credit for building the a platform in-house and having the foresight to sell these services. It transformed Amazon from an e-commerce site to a technology powerhouse. For example, my primary area of interest in AWS is Amazon Connect, which originated from the internal CX platform the company used for its contact centers and agents. Now anyone can sign up and experiment with a cloud-based IVR, and even integrate it with other Amazon web services to create custom features.

The way I see it, AWS is a big bucket of many types of Lego bricks. That's also a common theme in the Summit sessions and workshops: we just provide the services for you to build whatever you want. Amazon Lex, part of AWS' machine learning suite, can hook into an Amazon Connect call flow to provide natural language understanding capabilities; or use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to enable text message interactions; or have a developer go wild with Amazon Lambda integration, which allows code to run in a serverless environment with limitless potential.

There was an impressive AI-powered speech analytics demo which illustrates what one can do with a combination of Amazon Connect, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Translate; but other pieces of the solution also include Amazon Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon S3. Indeed, just like assembling Lego blocks but perhaps with a higher level of difficulty.

It also dawned on me that the new generation(s) of developers are coding in a boundless computing environment. During lunch at the Summit I got to chat with a couple of young(er) repeat attendees whom seemed quite experienced with AWS software engineering. They gave me an odd look (and I dated myself) when I told them about writing code then having to pick a compiler in order to spit out the best optimized executable program for the hardware. What ridiculous programming concepts when you write code today without RAM, storage, or bandwidth constraints!

The resources and expenses from organizing this conference are unlikely to impact Amazon's bottom line, but the offer of free is greatly appreciated. I left the Summit a little more knowledgable about AWS, made a few acquaintances, and more importantly, inspired like a child in a room full of Lego bricks.