AWS Summit Review by a VMware guy – Part 1

So today, I attended the AWS Summit in San Francisco.  This is my first non VMware conference, so I admit I was a little excited to attend the conference.  I thought it would be a good to write an AWS Summit Review from a VMware guys perspective.  So welcome to Part 1.

Disclaimer: If you don’t know, I work for VMware in the vCloud Hybrid Service Business Unit.  You will not find anything in this article that is in any way detrimental to VMware or its services.  If your looking for that, sorry.

Right, now thats out the way, lets talk about the day, and provide an intro to my later posts.

One of the cool things about the AWS Summit is the fact that its free!  Yes free!  I like this idea, as it means a lot of people who don’t/cant haver the means to pay $$$ for conferences can actually attend one, and get to network with like minded individuals.  This is pretty cool tbh.

We started with the AWS Keynote, which (as expected) was all about what Amazon can do today.  The Keynote speaker did a great job in my opinion.  He had a big room, and as some one who has presented at numerous conferences, I know how it feels to stand up there and talk.  Well done to Andy Jassy.

Some of the key areas he spoke about was the new releases on the compute side.  How they are increasing the performance and lowering the cost of the services like EC2 and Storage.  For me, this is a pretty cool thing to see.  AWS are not standing still, which ultimately means that they know people want there business, and have to adapt to keep the said business!  Why do I think this is pretty cool?  Well as a VMware guy, as Gartner have said, AWS are the market leaders, and that means we have the opportunity and the challenge to build a better cloud service than seen in the market today!  Personally, I love a challenge and VMware does too!  VMware has been and always will be a market disruptor in my opinion.

The keynote finished and it was time for lunch.  As you can imagine, it’s a free conference, and the lunches represented this.  The Moscone Center is not renowned for its lunches anyway, but this one was particularly un-impressive.  Lots of carbs to send you to sleep for the afternoon.  My favourite part was the ability to network.  There was tons of developers in the room, which was amazing to see.  As someone with an IT Admin background, I always believed developers never left the sanctuary of the virtual world, so to meet with them and talk with them was a real eye opener.  These guys are passionate, but I did get lost at times when the talk started focusing on JBOS and Wildfly! What was that about? 😉

Once I had eaten the said delicious plastic sandwich, I had the opportunity to visit the Exhibitor stands.  It was pretty cool to see some familiar faces in the room, some of the vendors have also been present at VMworld and PEX, so I had the chance to chat with them.

Its now time for the breakout sessions, and I will write more on the technical stuff this afternoon.

The second part of my AWS Summit Review can be read here.