Another year and another AWS re:Invent conference. This time with more people and longer lines. The down side, the re:Play after party was insane. A good time, however this year had multiple issues with long 15-20 minutes of waiting, only to find out “we’re out of food”. Wow. Not just one area, but multiple areas out of food. I think a serious logistic issue occurred. The past years I never experienced any issue with waiting longer than a couple minutes for drinks or even hardly waiting for food. I’ll say it was a communication issue this time, hopefully next year(2019) will be a smoother process to get food out quickly.

On the plus side, I did have access to the Certification Lounge. That made getting drinks, snacks and coffee a very quick experience. However, most of the time, all the nice seating was occupied. I think they had roughly 50 nice seats and a few small benches. Needs to be a bigger area for sure!

For the most part, overall was a very good conference, I heard around 55K+ people attended. Of course the lines for sessions are always packed, a good thing they’re recorded. This year they added little pins to track down either by word-of-mouth or doing certain sessions/activities and you’re awarded one of 60 pins. Lots of vendors did the same thing, lots of pins to collect, even doing different pins for different days.

A nice AWS swag item they added was a little water bottle, similar to what the Salesforce conference was doing. This made dealing with the Las Vegas heat nicer! Other than walking 10+ miles daily, the conference is awesome! Hope to see everyone again next year.