Last month, I went to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) summit in Toronto. I wanted to go in years previous, but never quite made it. This year though, as I’m aiming to take my first cloud certification soon (not in AWS) I decided to attend. AWS is the market share leader in the cloud space and I wanted to learn more.
My first impression was that the summit was huge. I’d estimate it at over than 5000+ people, with talks and the expo spread across multiple floors at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Having attended multiple conferences in the past, I found the sheer size a bit overwhelming at first but soon settled in.
I first checked out the expo which was set up in the main hall for a few minutes but my main interest was the keynote. Before I get into the actual talk I, as a former event organizer, I have to commend Amazon for their ability to efficiently deal with large crowds. For example before the keynote, a room full of hundreds of people, employees directed folks where to sit as they filled the seats section by section. This ensured that the keynote started exactly on the hour.
As for the keynote, one of the first things highlighted was Amazon’s commitment to net zero emissions by 2040. As someone who is deeply interested in intersection of energy use in the cloud/AI space this was good to hear. On the other hand, with the growing use of more LLM models
The keynote continued into local customer stories including how Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment is using AI tools in their sporting operations to help their players develop their skills faster(and win more games). Another tool they build using AWS & AI was the ability to search through games to find highlights thus creating social media content faster. Finally, for the developers Amazon Q was highlighted how code can be written faster in visual studio code.
The rest of the summit featured talks, hands on-labs and demos for people of all skills levels. Something I really appreciated this AWS summit were the talks geared towards those newer to AWS. I found out more about AWS Skill builder was particularly intrigued by their games aimed at teaching cloud topics. That being said something that was missing though was a conversation on how to get hired after getting a certification. There could have been a longer conversation on hiring practices, strategies and discussions on how to get one’s foot in the door given the tough hiring market.
In closing, I’ll share some tips: