The Enterprise Alchemists
The Enterprise Alchemists is a new podcast for Enterprise Architects to have honest and in-depth conversations about what is relevant to our world. Expert guests provide additional context on the topics of the day in Enterprise IT.
Your hosts, Guy Murphy and Dominic Wellington, are Enterprise Architects at SnapLogic, with more decades of experience between them than they care to admit to, and the stories that go with it.
The Enterprise Alchemists
What is the value of AWS re:Invent for an Enterprise Architect?
AWS re:Invent hardly needs much introduction from us. It has become *the* must-attend event for tech enthusiasts and industry professionals alike. However, Guy has never attended, and is a little sceptical. Listen in as Dominic tries to explain the value of attending one of the last remaining mega tech gatherings.
The event's theme of an "infinite toolbox" is a big clue, but you should also remember the hallway track, with opportunities to catch up with sixty thousand industry leaders and AWS community members.
We will be trying to capture the vibrant buzz from Las Vegas, with live-blogging of the keynotes on LinkedIn, as well as field podcast recordings if we can manage that.
Getting ready for AWS re:Invent 2024: https://www.snaplogic.com/blog/autonomous-ai-agents-aws-reinvent
The SnapLogic booth is #1951, in Hall B at the Venetian. Come and say hi!
Regina Goodman’s speech is on Monday at 17.30 in the theatre of the GenAI pavilion. Look for session "AIM386-S | Optimizing data workflows for AI with SnapLogic and AWS" in the session catalog: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/.
Last year's recap blog: https://www.snaplogic.com/blog/reinvention-bright-lights-future-aws-reinvent
Find more details and a full transcript on SnapLogic's Integration Nation community site.
Hi and welcome back to the Enterprise Alchemists. This is Dominic Wellington, your host, together with my colleague, uy Murphy. Hey, uy.
Guy Murphy:Hello Dominic, good to be here again.
Dominic Wellington:So this week we're doing something a little bit different. As we record, it's a Thursday of Thanksgiving for our American colleagues, who will be elbow deep in their turkeys about now, probably. We're going to try to get this out quickly so that you can listen to it on your way to AWS re:Invent, if you're going, or as the fever pitch of social promotion builds up on all of your various feeds, and try to get an idea of what it's all about, because I will be going to Las Vegas. If you're going to be at the show, come by and say hi. But Guy has never been and I think it's fair to say he's somewhat sceptical.
Guy Murphy:I think that's a fair comment, Dominic. I've attended, I've presented at, many marketing events, but some of these mega events that I remember in the early 2000s, the Microsoft Worlds, etc., they seem to peak and fade off. And re:Invent, along with Salesforce, seems to be the last of these mega events. Maybe I'm getting a little bit old and sceptical, but there's a cost to go to this thing. Is it really worth going to? Obviously, with new platforms, these things can be streamed and there's probably value. But you know, you've been there and you've seen the quality of these events. Convince me!
Dominic Wellington:That's exactly what we want to do. So, yeah, re:Invent, as you say, is almost the last one standing together with Dreamforce. I always explain it to people this is what VMworld used to be 15 years ago, and you went there not so much because you wanted to hear the latest about VMware, because that was the nominal point of going, if you went to the European ones, to Barcelona, the American ones are more itinerant, but because everyone else was there. So it was where you could catch up on all sorts of things that were at least even slightly VMware adjacent. And AWS re:Invent has kind of become that.
Dominic Wellington:I literally know people who go to Vegas during re:Invent week and they don't buy tickets, they just sit in the Venetian outside and they have meetings because everyone is there. And from a purely vendor perspective, it can be easier to get a meeting with someone when you're both in Vegas and say let's just grab a coffee or whatever, than it might be to go and meet them in their office.
Dominic Wellington:So that's a little bit of inside baseball of the vendor perspective, but as a practitioner, still there's a huge amount of value, I think, in just wondering about, in a crowd, a massive herd of like-minded people because you go to the booths. The booths at re:Invent, they tend not to be staffed by attractive young people in skimpy clothing. They tend to be staffed by actual technical people who you can have a conversation as in-depth as you want about whatever topic. So if you go and wander around the booths of vendors that you're interested in, that you think might be relevant, and you have questions, there's someone there who can answer that question. I mean, look for the grumpy person in a black t-shirt at the back skulking. That's the one you want to talk to. But there is one there. That's the value if you are looking at it from that perspective.
Guy Murphy:From the event point of view, I know that you visited there as a vendor and you presented there. I'm assuming it has classic breakouts. What's the sort of quality of the breakouts as an event?
Dominic Wellington:It's very high, I have to say. So obviously there are the AWS-led events. I don't have the stats in front of me, but there are thousands of individual presentations during the week and less than half of them are AWS-led. A lot of them are from the AWS community. They have the AWS champions, I believe they're called, but a lot of them are from people who are, you know, celebrities in their own right and their own little corner of the technical world.
Dominic Wellington:And if you're into observability, for instance, the crew from Honeycomb will be there, and these are people who have formed what observability is considered to be these days, and so you go to their presentation. You're going to learn something for sure. The value tends to be extremely high. They also do these chalk talks, and so, again, these are for going as deep as you care to go into some AWS technology.
Dominic Wellington:You're not going to get slick slides. It's literally someone who's going to get up at as a blackboard and sketch out whatever you're asking about. from
Dominic Wellington:an AWS perspective, it's the theme of the week has turned your ideas into reality, which is definitely a marketing theme.
Dominic Wellington:But then, further down the page, there's a more interesting aside, which is welcome to the infinite toolbox, which is interesting on a couple of levels, as, okay, we're talking about tools in a toolbox, we're building stuff, uh. So that's already giving you an idea of what sort of event is. You see a lot more, uh, black t-shirts than you see suits and ties, so that that's one thing, but it's also the infinite toolbox that's. That's very much the aws approach, isn't it? You have 17 ways of doing anything that you want and they're all laid out on a bench in front of you, but that's a long bench. So AWS reInvent is also a way to make sense of what is valuable among all of those tools and which other vendors you can work with, such as hi SnapLogic to help make sense of all of those different tools as a quick aside, obviously, such as hi SnapLogic to help make sense of all of those different tools.
Guy Murphy:As a quick aside obviously, we're obviously attending. We have a booth there Also. I believe we're presenting there. What's the sort of topics we're going to be focusing on?
Dominic Wellington:Yeah. So the SnapLogic booth, if you're going, is booth 1951. You can find us in the app. All of that good stuff, I'll put links in the show notes. All of that good stuff, I'll put links in the show notes.
Dominic Wellington:Our very good friend, Regina is going to be giving a speech on the Monday at 5.30 in the theater of the Gen AI Pavilion, talking about, yes, gen AI. I did make a little gag in my blog post, which I'll also link. If you go and look at the list of topics for the event, you'll see AI is the first one, right at the top of the list. Then you notice the second one is analytics, and then you realize it's sorted alphabetically. But you know, nevermind, the point stands AI is definitely king this year, even more than it was last year. If possible, we'll see, I'll report back. Last year AI was huge. There was a launch of Q, amazon Q and various other bits and pieces around that. But it looks like this year there's going to be even more. That innovates with generative AI, again as one of the sub-themes of the website. So it is November, december 2024. That's pretty much a given that there's going to be talk of generative AI, that there's going to be talk of generative AI.
Dominic Wellington:What I'm hoping to see is that we'll be moving from the promise of this stuff to concrete results, because that's what we've been telling people. I just came from an event we did in London and we were talking about okay, chat GPT is two years old now. We've all been experimenting with it. What have we seen? What works, what doesn't't and it's interesting to have that conversation with different people. Oh, we tried, this didn't work. Here's what we we were able to to get some value out of. Here's how we got that. And and now, with the talk of agentic ai, we're getting another go-round of that. Things that maybe weren't possible previously, with the whole tool calling idea, become more possible. So again, I'm hoping to hear some very concrete reports of that, both in the keynotes. So I'll be live blogging the keynotes uh. Dr swami siva supramanian's keynote on the wednesday uh is usually very interesting on that front. Again, I'll report back excellent, okay.
Guy Murphy:Well, I'm gonna say I'm sounding a little bit more convinced and slightly more jive spot. I won't be there. I'll be dipping in and out of it on some of the streaming loads.
Dominic Wellington:Yeah, the event is really good about giving live streams. The keynotes are all fully live and most things are recorded, so you can get a decent view of it remotely. And obviously we did during the pandemic we did run these fully remotely. It's a pretty accessible event, even for people who are not at the show. Obviously, you miss the hobnobbing and the random unexpected events. The hallway track is always a standout, although the hallways at the Venetian do get extremely crowded.
Guy Murphy:I think that's probably a good problem to have. So are there any last thoughts you'd like to share with our fellow listeners and journeymen on this? Tips, techniques, how to survive a week in Vegas.
Dominic Wellington:Oof! I mean, there's some stuff that is generally applicable to Vegas. Bring lip balm. Seriously, every guide to Las Vegas includes lip balm and every year there are people who are surprised. It is a desert and all the indoor spaces are violently air conditioned. You will need lip balm. You should also drink plenty of water, and wear comfortable shoes, because there is a lot of walking.
Dominic Wellington:Plan your agenda if you're coming in person, because there's a lot of walking and most of the events are actually first come, first served. You can put them in your agenda, but that doesn't reserve you a place. So leave yourself both time to get there and time enough to be there before everyone else, especially for popular sessions.
Dominic Wellington:Keynotes and very popular sessions get spillover rooms, so if you can't get into the live room, you can go and watch it on a video in another room. But at that point, why are you in Vegas? You could just have stayed home. That's me being cynical, perhaps.
Dominic Wellington:But yeah, plan out who you want to hit. You want to go see the SnapLogic booth? You want to ask questions of engineers? Make sure that you make time for that and work out how that fits into your agenda. If there are particular sessions that you want to attend, such as the SnapLogic presentation, you should again figure out where that is, because there are so many sessions, you will find that you know you want to be in three that are all scheduled at the same time. And, yeah, you're going to have to pick and choose and catch the recording of the others, but do make time for the hallway track. We're techies. We don't always like to talk to people, but this is an opportunity to talk to like 60,000 of your peers, literally. And again, it is our peers. It is people who live and breathe this stuff and who do it for a living and who do it at a level sufficient that they can spend several thousand dollars of their company's money and a week of their time going to do this. So that's already an indication right there of their dedication.
Guy Murphy:Excellent, thank you for sharing and, yeah, I think from my point of view it sounds like a great source of knowledge for applying to your strategies, your architectures and understanding where the market's going.
Dominic Wellington:Yeah, I generally find value from going there. And I've been lucky to go to many of these things. So if you're going to be at the show, hit us up. There will be various dispatches from the show during the week on LinkedIn. I will be live blogging the keynotes at least, and we'll see if we can also get some field recordings of podcasts. But for now it's goodbye from me on my way to Las Vegas.
Guy Murphy:It's goodbye from me, who will be watching on the streams
Dominic Wellington:And we'll talk to you again next week.
