AWS re:Invent 2021 conference is just a few days ahead, and the session catalog is open. Here are the hottest sessions on #Serverless, #DataEngineering, and #DevOps, hand-picked by NordHero specialists. You’re welcome!
Pst! In case you haven’t yet registered for the conference, start by enrolling at https://reinvent.awsevents.com/, and start building your schedule for the week. You can use the Session Ids mentioned below to find the sessions quickly.
Keynotes
Adam Selipsky Keynote
Session Id: KYN002-AM/GMT
Adam Selipsky has taken his seat as AWS CEO. We are eager to hear his view on AWS’s competitive edge and strategical choices for the next few years.
Werner Vogels Keynote
Session Id: KYN005-AM/GMT
Year after year, it’s always fascinating to hear the behind-the-scenes stories from Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogel. Amazon is, of course, among the largest AWS customers and an excellent benchmark for AWS’s performance and resilience capabilities.
Serverless Architecture & Containers
Accelerating your serverless journey with AWS Lambda
Session Id: SVS205-L-GMT
David Richardson, VP of Serverless at AWS, outlines AWS’s learnings on building for long-term success and scale with Lambda-centric applications. He’ll highlight how AWS continues to invest in features that make it easier to use Lambdas.
Application integration patterns for microservices
Session Id: API201
If you have ever developed your solution on microservice architecture, you must have realized that there will be a lot of communication between components over the network. To solve those issues, join this session to learn some of the fundamental application integration patterns based on asynchronous messaging.
Inside a working serverless SaaS reference solution
Session Id: ARC405
How to implement tenant isolation in an AWS Lambda environment? How to build multi-tenant-aware microservices in a serverless model? If those questions give you a headache, you need to check this session to learn the best patterns to use.
Kubernetes at AWS: Strategy, road map, and vision
Session Id: CON206
Learn about the AWS vision for Amazon EKS and the recent enhancements regarding the service. This session also includes a neat customer case: Learn how Salesforce re-architected its infrastructure and launched a Kubernetes platform built on Amazon EKS.
The powerful simplicity of Amazon ECS
Session Id: CON208
If you prefer AWS to manage your containers for you, join this session. Nicholas Harteau, General Manager for Amazon ECS, will dive deep into Amazon ECS, AWS Copilot, AWS App Runner, and Amazon ECS Anywhere and discuss the future vision for Amazon ECS.
Data Engineering
Reinvent your business for the future with AWS Analytics
Session Id: ANT214-L-GMT
Before drilling into the details of different Data Engineering services, it’s worthwhile to take a broader perspective. Rahul Pathak, VP of AWS Analytics, addresses the current state of analytics on AWS, focusing on the latest service innovations. Learn the secrets of data lakes and purpose-built data stores. And discover how to build new experiences and reimagine old processes with a modern data architecture on AWS.
Serverless data integration with AWS Glue
Session id: ANT317
AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes data preparation simpler, faster, and cheaper. In this session, learn about the latest innovations in AWS Glue and hear how an AWS customer uses AWS Glue to enable self-service data preparation across their organization.
What’s new with Amazon Athena
Session id: ANT307
Amazon Athena is a highly scalable analytics service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 and other data stores. And a perfect pair with AWS Glue. This session offers a deep dive into the service, customer use cases, best practices, newly launched features, and what is next for Amazon Athena. A must-see for all Data Engineers there. And here.
Enhance your apps with Amazon QuickSight embedded analytics
Session Id: BSI203
Glue and Athena already mentioned, so QuickSight is for sure the next one. Join this session to learn about QuickSight’s new capabilities for embedding rich data visualizations within applications, providing the needed governance and data security. The session also shows how you can easily connect QuickSight to your choice of data services, including Amazon RDS, Amazon Athena, Amazon S3, or Amazon Redshift. Excellent stuff here!
Democratizing data for self-service analytics and ML
Session Id: ANT303
Access to all your data for fast analytics at scale. That is what your data engineers, database developers, data analysts, data scientists, BI professionals, and the line of business are all looking for. With this session, you’ll learn how easy-to-use ML can help imagine new products or services, transform customer experiences, streamline business operations, and improve decision-making. A lot promised here, and we will be all ears.
Building data lakes in highly regulated markets
Session Id: COM204
Dive deep into the overall architecture of a data lake built using cloud-native tools such as AWS Lake Formation and AWS Glue. Discover answers to questions such as which tools to use to ingest various data sources into a data lake? How do you clean the data and make sure all metadata is in place? How do you make a data lake GDPR compliant? These are the key questions when crunching any data containing PII (personally identifiable information).
DevOps, IaC and Operational Excellence
Best practices for securing your software delivery lifecycle
Session id: DOP313
In this session, learn about ways you can secure your AWS CI/CD pipeline. Review topics like the pipeline’s security versus security in the pipeline and learn about practices to incorporate security checkpoints across various pipeline stages, security event management, and aggregation of vulnerability findings into a unified display.
Infrastructure as code and modern data resilience on AWS
Session id: DOP322-S
Infrastructure as code (IaC) approach can radically improve application reliability and modernize data resilience on AWS. Learn how to successfully manage data in an IaC environment, improve productivity, streamline processes, and minimize the risk of human error.
Automating cross-account CI/CD pipelines
Session Id: DOP402
What about IaC and automatic deployments with a multi-account approach? When building a deployment strategy for applications, using a multi-account approach is a recommended best practice. With a multi-account approach you can have better modularity, security, and governance. In this session, dive deep into an example multi-account deployment using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) services such as the AWS CDK, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CloudFormation. Also, explore a real-world customer use case that is deploying at scale across hundreds of AWS accounts.
Beyond five 9s: Lessons from our highest available data planes
Session Id: ARC326
Five 9s refer to the availability percentage of some AWS services, meaning practically 99,999% availability. Downtime per year is only up to 5 minutes. That’s not much. This session concentrates on how AWS has built and architected Amazon Route 53 and the AWS authentication system, designed to survive cataclysmic failures, enormous load increases, and more. Learn AWS’s approach to redundancy and resilience at the infrastructure, software, and team levels. Explore how teams tasked with keeping the internet running manage themselves and keep up with the pace of change that AWS customers demand. This session is a must-see for all SREs (Site Reliability Engineers).
The journey from telemetry to business metrics (sponsored by Datadog)
Session Id: DOP213-S
Simple applications can have a straightforward metrics setup. But as applications nowadays are a collection of microservices, data storage services, and integration services, the metrics are not obvious or easy to plan. And as your application gains more attraction from users, the service and business level requirements for metrics will also grow. This session discusses what’s important to the engineering and business sides of a company and strategies to reach a good middle ground for what needs to be watched. This presentation is brought to you by Datadog.
Keeping Netflix reliable using prioritized load shedding
Session Id: NFX302
Netflix is always interesting. Their working model is exciting, and their technology is certainly interesting. AWS re:Invent has many sessions by Netflix. We chose this one because, evidently, Netflix has done something right with its availability and resiliency. Failure can occur for many reasons, including clients that trigger a retry storm, an under-scaled service in the backend, a misconfigured ASG policy, a bad deployment, a network blip between AWS Availability Zones, or noisy Amazon EC2 neighbors. Each of these examples has interrupted Netflix members' ability to stream at some point in the past. In this session, learn how Netflix set out to be more resilient by consistently prioritizing requests across device types, progressively throttling requests based on priority, and validating assumptions by using chaos testing(deliberate fault injection) for requests of specific priorities.
Last but not least
15 years of AWS with Jeff Barr
Session Id: BOA201
Jeff Barr is a phenomenon. For as long as we remember, Jeff has been the man explaining the new and cool innovations AWS has brought to the development community. Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 are turning 15 this year, and Jeff Barr, VP and Chief Evangelist at AWS, has been at Amazon even longer! In this breakout session, have a chat with him about how AWS was born, how the developer experience has evolved over the years, and how customers keep surprising us with their amazing projects. Along the way, Jeff also answers questions sent by the developer community and shares lessons on how to best build on AWS.