Category: AWS re:Invent


Announcing Internet of Things (IoT) Hack Day at re:Invent

by Jeff Barr | on | in AWS re:Invent | | Comments

Are you familiar with the Internet of Things? Before too long, many of the devices in your life will be connected to the Internet and to the cloud on a full or part-time basis. They will generate a constant stream of position, condition, and sensor data and send it to the AWS Cloud for storage (S3 and DynamoDB), messaging (SNS), identity (Cognito), real-time processing (Kinesis), and analysis (Amazon Redshift and EMR).

For example, I have a Fuse plugged in to one of my vehicles. I plugged it in to the OBD port, configured my account, and was good to go. The device sends vehicle condition information (pulled from the OBD data) and position data (from its built-in GPS) to the cloud using a built-in cellular modem. I can easily track the position and condition of my car, regardless of which member of my family happens to be driving it.

IoT HackDay at re:Invent


We are very excited about the prospects for the Internet of Things. In order to help you to learn more, we will be conducting our first-ever Internet of Things HackDay at re:Invent. As a participant in this event you will learn how to build your first “Hello World” application on an AWS-connected device. After that you will spend the rest of the time conceptualizing, prototyping, and building your something cool and demo-worthy.

Our friends at Intel and Spark Labs will bring their latest microcontrollers and boards, along with a big pile of sensors, wires, LEDs, and breadboards to help you get started. Bring your laptop, your imagination and some good ideas; we’ll have plenty of geeky giveaways and plenty of fuel — snacks, coffee, and beer!

Space is limited and we can only accommodate 200 re:Invent attendees. To sign up, log in to your re:Invent account and add this event to your schedule. If you want to create a team ahead of time, register and then stand by for our pre-event survey. We’ll collect enough additional information at that time to put you together with your team.

Jeff & Jinesh;

PS – Don’t confuse this with the re:Invent Tatonka Challenge, which could also be thought of as the Internet of Wings.

Launch Your Startup at AWS re:Invent

by Jeff Barr | on | in AWS re:Invent, Startups | | Comments

Sitting here at my desk in Seattle, I am surrounded by colleagues that are working non-stop to make this year’s AWS re:Invent conference the best one yet! I get to hear all about the keynotes, sessions, and the big party without even leaving my desk.

In 2013, five exciting startups had the opportunity to launch at re:Invent in a session emceed by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Representatives from Koality, CardFlight, Runscope, SportXast, and Nitrous.IO each presented for five minutes and fielded Werner’s questions for another minute.

The tradition will continue in 2014. If your AWS-powered startup is currently in stealth mode or if you are already out-and-about and are ready to announce a major feature on stage with Werner, I would like to invite you to apply to do so at re:Invent.

For consideration, please email the following information to awsstartuplaunch@amazon.com (keep your response to 500 words or less):

    Company Overview – Tell us your company name, location, website URL, and give us some information about your core product or service.
    Launch Details – Tell us what you plan to launch or announce.
    Target Audience – Describe the target market and audience for your product or service (businesses, consumers, teachers, students, etc).
    AWS Usage – List the AWS services that you use.
    Team Background – Include some background information on you and on your team.
    Exclusive Offer – Tell us about an exclusive offer that you can make to re:Invent attendees.

You’ll need to have the information to us before 5:00 PM PT on September 30th. You’ve got a month and we can’t wait to hear from you!

Jeff;

AWS re:Invent 2013 Video re:Cap

by Jeff Barr | on | in AWS re:Invent | | Comments

If you were not able to make the trip to Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent, you missed an action-packed week. Lee Zen and I spent a lot of time recording videos to capture the excitement. Here are the videos, along with some links to additional information.

Watch the following videos (11 minutes of content altogether) and you should get a pretty good sense of the event. I hope to see you there in 2014.

Day 1

Day2

Day 3

— Jeff;

AWS re:Invent Hackathon 2013

by Jeff Barr | on | in AWS re:Invent | | Comments

We have organized a unique Hackathon for re:Invent 2013. The event will run from 9:00 AM to Midnight on November 12th in Ballroom A of the Venetian conference center in Las Vegas.

Hack Away
Participants will assemble into teams and compete to solve a challenge faced by one of four non-profit organizations that have agreed to attend and participate. Here are the organizations and the challenges:

  • United Way wants an app to help users find volunteer opportunities in their area.
  • Donor’s Choose wants to make their data more accessible to researchers.
  • Cancer Research UK wants to help mobile users turn their bad behaviors into positive change.
  • NASA/JPL wants to index and combine 11 data sets to allow users to subscribe to notifications for various terrestrial and extraterrestrial events.

Where appropriate, the teams will be provided with data in CSV form, suitable for parsing and loading into a database. Full instructions will be provided at the event.

Schedule
Breakfast will be served at 8:00 AM to give attendees the opportunity to fuel up, mingle, and to form teams. After a few introductory remarks at 9:00 AM, coding will commence at 9:15 AM and proceed uninterrupted until 10:00 PM.

We will provide food, power, white boards, connectivity, AWS credits, and AWS expertise throughout the day.

At 10:00 PM, each team will have three minutes to demonstrate their work to the audience and to the panel of judges.

The judges will announce the results at 11:30 PM and the hackathon will wrap up at the stroke of Midnight.

Judging and Prizes
The judges will evaluate each entry against the following criteria:

  • Successfully meeting the needs of the organization (0-10 points).
  • Appropriate use of AWS services (0-5 points).
  • Design, presentation, and creativity (0-5 points).
  • Technical expertise (0-5 points).
  • Wow factor (0-5 points).

One runner-up winner will be chosen for each of the four challenges. Each member of the winning team will receive $250 in AWS credits and an AWS re:Invent Hackathon t-shirt.

One of the four teams will be awarded the grand prize.  Each member of the winning team will receive the items listed above, plus VIP tickets to the re:Invent Pub Crawl, a signed copy of Scott Berkun’s new book, The Year Without Pants (a very good read, by the way), and an Amazon Kindle. I will review the winning entry in a blog post.

Prepare to Hack
We are looking forward to seeing everyone who has registered for the hackathon. If you will be there, please take some time to complete your profile ahead of time. This will streamline the process of team formation, giving you more time to hack.

See you there!

— Jeff;

PS – If you are from the Press, and would like to attend and observe, please contact us at reinventhackathon@amazon.com and we’ll issue you a pass for the day.

Top Ten Sessions at AWS re:Invent 2013

by Jeff Barr | on | in AWS re:Invent | | Comments

I am counting down the days to AWS re:Invent and am looking forward to meeting as many of my loyal readers as possible.

With just a week to go, I thought it would be fun to let you know a bit more about the most popular sessions and to share some interesting stats and facts about the sessions.

Most Anticipated Sessions
We announced the session list last month and made the Session Builder available so that you could make the most out of your time at the conference. Based on the sign-ups to date, here are the ten most anticipated sessions at the conference:

  • SPOT205 Why Scale Matters and How the Cloud Really is Different.
  • SPOT201 Managing the Pace of Innovation: Behind the Scenes at AWS.
  • SPOT401 Leading the NoSQL Revolution: Under the Covers of Distributed Systems at Scale.
  • ARC202 High Availability Application Architectures in Amazon VPC.
  • ARC307 Continuous Integration and Deployment Best Practices on AWS.
  • ARC305 How Netflix Leverages Multiple Regions to Increase Availability: An Isthmus and Active-Active Case Study.
  • ARC308 Architecting for End-to-End Security in the Enterprise.
  • ARC302 Data Replication Options in AWS.
  • CPN204 Architecting for Availability with Elastic Load Balancing.
  • DAT203 AWS Storage and Database Architecture Best Practices.

Session Stats and Highlights
As you can tell from the Session Builder, you have even more choices this year.  We have a total of 202 sessions across 13 tracks. That’s 34% more sessions than we had in 2012.

We’ve signed up a total of 361 speakers, 175 from the AWS team and 186 from our customer base.

Our customers are doing a lot of amazing things with AWS and they are ready to talk about their work at re:Invent! Attendees will get to hear from the hottest startups and the most progressive enterprises, with speakers from Dropbox, Riot Games, Yelp, Shazam, SmugMug, Twitter, The Weather Channel, Dole, Intuit, NASA, Boeing, Nike, Netflix and more.

We have added a Spotlight track to highlight some of the most popular content including a Scale talk from James Hamilton, Startup launches hosted by Werner Vogels, a Pace of Innovation talk from Charlie Bell and Khawaja Shams, and a NoSQL / DynamoDB talk from Swami Sivasubramanian.

We have created a Japanese-language track, with 13 sessions and simultaneous translation.

We have scaled up the rooms for many of the sessions to accomodate even more attendees, and we have put the most popular content in the biggest rooms.

See you in Vegas!

— Jeff;

 

The Startup Experience at AWS re:Invent

by Jeff Barr | on | in AWS re:Invent | | Comments

If you are part of a startup or if you have the entrepreneurial itch and aren’t sure how to scratch it, we have some AWS re:Invent sessions and events that will be of particular interest to you!

Werner Vogels
Amazon.com CTO Dr. Werner Vogels will be leading three separate startup events at re:Invent. All three events are scheduled for Thursday, November 14th in Marcello 4406:

  • Fireside Chats – Werner will host fireside chats with startup founders and other influencers. His guests will include Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, Eliot Horowitz of MongoDB, Valentino Volonghi of AdRoll, and Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures. Session One starts at 1:30 PM; Session Two follows at 3:00 PM.
  • Startup Launches – Five brand-new AWS-powered startup companies will launch in this fast-paced session at 4:15 PM.

Venture Capitalist Session
In this session you have the opportunity to listen and learn about the process of selecting and investing in startups powered by AWS from representatives from some of the best known Venture Capitalist firms including Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners, Matt McIIwain of Madrona Venture Group, Mike Goguen of Sequoia Capital, Asheem Chandna of Greylock Partners, and Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures. This session is scheduled for Wednesday, November 13th at 3:00 PM in Marcello 4406.

Technical Sessions
Attend the re:Invent technical sessions to learn more about AWS and how to utilize our products and services at all stages of the startup lifecycle. You’ll hear from some of the most successful startups running on AWS including AirbnbDropbox, and Coursera.

Fun
Join the AWS Startup team, AWS evangelists, and your peers for an evening of networking and drinks.  Dont forget to stop by and pick up some AWS goodies and enter our raffle. This event will take place on Wednesday, November 13th at 5:30 PM in the second floor of Canaletto in the Venetian.

For a complete listing of startup-related activities and events during AWS re:Invent, please visit the Startup Experience page.

— Jeff;

AWS Training and Certification Update – Exams at re:Invent, More Options

by Jeff Barr | on | in AWS re:Invent | | Comments

The AWS Training and Certification program has been expanding in breadth and in depth. We are adding more training and more certifications, all with the goal of helping you to learn more about how to design, build, and run applications on AWS.

New AWS Certification Beta Exams
If you will be attending AWS re:Invent next month, you have a unique opportunity to take part in the development of the AWS Training and Certification curriculum.

We recently released a pair of new AWS Certification beta exams:

These beta exams, along with an exam for the existing AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level, will be available at AWS re:Invent 2013, and are open to all interested attendees.

We use beta exams to evaluate questions that may be used in the final AWS Certification exams. We typically releases the final exam approximately eight to ten weeks after closing the beta exam period, and you will receive your exam score via email after the release of the final public exam. If you passed the exam, you will earn AWS Certification credentials which you can then use to demonstrate your expertise with AWS.

To help you to prepare for the new exams, we are also offering two new AWS Training courses:

  • Developing on AWS helps teach you to design and build secure, reliable and scalable AWS-based applications. The course covers fundamental concepts and baseline programming for developing applications on AWS. Read the exam guide to learn more about the knowledge and skills that will be validated by this exam.
  • Systems Operations on AWS is designed to help you operate highly available and scalable infrastructure on the AWS platform. In this course, we demonstrate how to effectively manage and support AWS resources. We cover concepts such as provisioning infrastructure, deploying applications, tracking costs, monitoring utilization, and creating backups. Read the exam guide to learn more about the knowledge and skills that will be validated by this exam.

These classes are available through AWS and our APN Training Partners.

If youre ready, you can take any, or all, of these exams at AWS re:Invent, and you can schedule an exam appointment through our testing partner Kryterion.

More Training Options
With AWS users in over 190 countries, we have been working to make a variety of training modes, methods, and options available. Here are some of the newest options:

Self-Paced LabsSelf-paced labs allow you to try AWS products and gain experience in a practice environment.  We currently have 15 labs to help you learn AWS Basics like creating an EC2 Instance, or working with more advanced AWS services such as CloudFormation or DynamoDB.  Get started at run.qwiklab.com.  Tokens are $29.99 each and discounts are available when purchased in token packages.

Instructor-Led ClassesAWS Training enables new customers get started with AWS and more experienced users to deepen their skills implementing AWS.  We now offer six role-based courses to enable customers to skill up and jumpstart deployments on AWS.  Two new courses for Developing on AWS and Systems Operations on AWS help individuals prepare for AWS Certification exams.

Private Onsite Training for Groups – Organizations that want to train a group can arrange for a dedicated onsite class.  Discounted pricing available based on the number of students. Contact us to arrange dedicated onsite training.

APN Training Partners Host AWS Training in New Areas – Our new APN Training Partner Program extends delivery of AWS Training into new markets across the globe, including Latin America, Europe, and Japan.  APN Training Partners offer public and onsite classes.

APN Partner TrainingAPN Partners have access to specialized training to help enable Business and Technical Professionals to effectively leverage AWS solutions to customers.  Partner Training, including free AWS Accreditations and e-learning courses, is available via the APN Portal.

— Jeff;