AWS Compute Blog
The attendee’s guide to the AWS re:Invent 2024 Compute track
This post is written by Markus Adhiwiyogo, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
From December 2nd to December 6th, AWS will hold its annual premier learning event: re:Invent. At this event, attendees can become stronger and more proficient in any area of AWS technology through a variety of experiences: large keynotes given by AWS leaders, smaller innovation talks and interactive working sessions given by AWS experts, and fun activities such as live music and games at re:Play.
There are over 2000+ learning sessions that focus on specific topics at various skill levels, and the compute team have created 72 unique sessions for you to choose. There are many sessions you can choose from, and we are here to help you choose the sessions that best fits your needs. Even if you are not able to join in person, you can catch-up with many of the sessions on-demand and even watch the keynote and innovation sessions live.
The Basic: Session types
If you’re able to join us, just a reminder that we offer several types of sessions which can help maximize your learning in a variety of AWS topics.
re:Invent attendees can also choose to attend chalk-talks, builder sessions, workshops, or code talk sessions. Each of these are live non-recorded interactive sessions.
- Breakout sessions: Attendees will be in a lecture-style 60-minute informative sessions presented by AWS experts, customers, or partners. These sessions are recorded and uploaded a few days after to the AWS Events YouTube channel.
- Chalk-talk sessions: Attendees will interact with presenters, asking questions and using a whiteboard in session.
- Builder Sessions: Attendees participate in a one-hour session and build something.
- Workshops sessions: Attendees join a two-hour interactive session where they work in a small team to solve a real problem using AWS services.
- Code talk sessions: Attendees participate in engaging code-focused sessions where an expert leads a live coding session.
- Lightning talk sessions: Attendees watch a 20-minute demo dedicated to either a specific service or customer story (located in the Expo Hall).
Getting started with Amazon EC2
The foundation of compute in AWS is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 800 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload. We’ve created the following sessions to help you implement and manage your workloads in Amazon EC2.
- CMP101 | What’s new with Amazon EC2
Learn about the latest compute innovations from AWS. This session helps you better understand Amazon EC2 instances and how organizations like yours can use them to run any workload while meeting your cost, performance, and sustainability goals. - CMP343 | Select and launch the right instance for your workload and budget
With more than 800 instances for various use cases, including instances best for common workloads and for workloads with specific requirements, how do you choose instances? Learn how to determine which instance is best for your specific use case and budget. - CMP319 | Managing Amazon EC2 capacity and availability
Amazon EC2 offers a variety of capacity usage and reservation models, so you can choose the right combination for your workload and budget. Learn how to combine these models in a way that’s best for your business and manage your capacity to improve utilization and availability. - CMP207 | AWS-accelerated computing enables customer success with generative AI
Discover how AWS provides the most performant, low-cost infrastructure for building and scaling large-scale generative AI models. Come learn what’s new in the accelerated computing portfolio including our GPU-based and AWS AI chips-powered instances. - CMP318 | Choose the optimal compute environment for your AI/ML workloads
If you’re trying to decide between accelerators such as AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium, GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, processors such as AWS Graviton, or managed services such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, this chalk covers the different options available on AWS.
Learn about AWS compute innovations
AWS has invested years designing custom silicon optimized for the cloud to deliver the best price performance for a wide range of applications and workloads using AWS services. Learn more about the AWS Nitro System, processors at AWS, and ML chips.
The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building block technologies that are powering the recent and future generations of Amazon EC2 instances. Dive deep into the Nitro System and see how it made the seemingly impossible possible.
- CMP320 | AWS Graviton: The best price performance for your AWS workloads
AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances provide the best price performance for workloads in Amazon EC2. Learn about common use cases, best practices to optimize your workloads across various applications, customer success stories, and how to accelerate your Graviton journey. - CMP209 | Conquer AI performance, cost, and scale with AWS AI chips
Generative AI promises to revolutionize industries, but its immense computational demands and escalating costs pose significant challenges. To overcome these hurdles, AWS designed and purpose-built AI chips including AWS Trainium2 and AWS Inferentia2.
- CMP334 | Deep dive into third generation AWS Nitro SSDs
Learn about AWS Nitro SSDs. Discover how AWS Nitro SSDs are different than other commercially available SSDs and see how AWS Nitro SSDs can deliver performance to benefit your workloads.
Optimize your compute costs
At AWS, we focus on delivering the best possible cost structure for our customers. Frugality is one of our founding leadership principles. Cost effective design continues to shape everything we do, from how we develop products to how we run our operations. Come learn of new ways to optimize your compute costs through AWS services, tools, and optimization strategies in the following sessions:
- CMP214 | Win-win: Maximize Amazon EC2 savings while improving performance
Let this session be your guide to building cost-effective, sustainable infrastructure without sacrificing application performance on AWS. Learn both technical and non-technical best practices for building efficient compute architectures on AWS. - CMP408 | Amazon EC2 flex instances: Deliver performance at lower cost
Amazon EC2 flex instances provide the easiest way to save costs and achieve better price performance for a majority of your workloads. In this session, dive deep into flex instances, explore how they deliver performance at lower cost, and identify the suitable workloads. - CMP312 | Spot the savings: Optimize deployments with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances use spare Amazon EC2 capacity available to you at steep discounts compared to on-demand prices. In this workshop, learn about the solutions, tools, and best practices to help you maximize your savings with Spot instances. - CMP346 | Uncover compute efficiency with AWS Graviton Savings Dashboard
The Graviton Savings Dashboard offers a comprehensive analysis of your compute usage, identifying prime candidates for Graviton migration. Learn how to implement and use the Graviton Savings Dashboard to quantify the potential TCO reduction from Graviton adoption. - CMP311 | Proactively scale for optimal cost and availability in Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups help you take advantage of the elasticity benefits that are built in to AWS. With more responsive and proactive scaling, you run only the required number of instances at any time of the day, reducing the cost of overprovisioned EC2 instancess
Maximize you workload’s performance
Your workload’s performance matters beyond just cost because it directly impacts the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of your compute solution. It can significantly influence customer satisfaction, business growth, and overall productivity. Even if a cheaper option exists, a low-cost option with poor performance can lead to long-term financial losses due to issues such as lost customers, engineering rework, and negative reputation. We have a number of sessions that help you optimize your workload’s performance.
- CMP411 | Everything you’ve wanted to know about performance on EC2 instances
This session covers all the details you’ve always wanted to know to optimize your compute performance such as memory topology, accessing hardware counters, accounting for the side-effects of hyperthreading, properly running performance tests, and optimizing your latency. - CMP413 | Moving from naive benchmarking to application performance engineering
Most of the time, benchmarks aren’t representative of their applications’ behaviors. In this session, learn the tools and best practices that will help you understand your applications’ performance behaviors on Amazon EC2 instances so that you can maximize your performance. - CMP405 | How to optimize latency and throughput
The availability of processors with and without hyperthreading makes performance evaluation a tricky game. In this code talk, study a web application and evaluate its performance in various scenarios, and discover how to optimize throughput and latency along the way.
Customer experiences and applications with machine learning
Machine learning (ML) has been evolving for decades and has an inflection point with generative AI applications capturing widespread attention and imagination. More customers, across a diverse set of industries, choose AWS compared to any other major cloud provider to build, train, and deploy their ML applications. Learn about generative AI infrastructure at Amazon or get hands-on experience building ML applications through our ML focused sessions, such as the following:
- CMP208 | Customer stories: Optimizing AI performance and cost with AWS AI chips
AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia deliver high-performance AI training and inference while reducing costs by up to 50%. Attend this session to hear from four AWS customers and how they realized these benefits to grow their businesses while delivering innovative experiences. - CMP321 | Explore the many ways to train foundation models on AWS
This session unravels the complexities of building and scaling large scale foundation models. From selecting the optimal compute resources to optimizing data pipelines and maximizing network performance. - CMP331 | Build and accelerate LLMs on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia using Ray
Learn how to accelerate the development and deployment of large language models (LLMs) with Ray, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia. This session delves into how Ray’s unified compute framework integrates with powerful AWS AI chips to optimize performance and cost efficiency. - CMP304 | Fine-tune Hugging Face LLMs using Amazon SageMaker and AWS Trainium
You can improve the performance of a pretrained LLM by fine-tuning the model using a smaller task-specific or domain-specific dataset. In this builders’ session, learn how to use Amazon SageMaker to fine-tune a pretrained Hugging Face LLM using AWS Trainium for inference use. - CMP337 | Fine-tune and deploy Llama 3.1 models on AWS Trainium and Inferentia
This session provides an overview of Neuron SDK and the various capabilities that maximize performance and deliver ease-of-use when training and deploying Llama 3.1 models on AWS AI chips. - CMP314 | Keeping it small: Agentic workflows with SLMs on AWS Inferentia
While LLMs offer versatility, smaller language models (SLMs) provide resource efficiency, speed, and simplicity. This session explores task simplification and decomposition techniques to harness multiple specialized SLMs, surpassing a single large model’s accuracy at fraction of cost. - CMP329 | Beyond text: Unlock multi-modal AI with AWS AI chips
Revolutionize your applications with multi-modal AI. Learn how to harness the power of AWS AI chips to create intelligent systems that understand and process text, images, and video. - CMP323 | Optimize your AI/ML workloads with Amazon EC2 Graviton
Join this session to explore performance, cost, and sustainability optimizations of your AI/ML solutions with services powered by AWS Graviton, accelerated computing instances, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. - CMP407 | Optimized RAG pipelines using AWS Graviton: VectorDB and LLM endpoints
Learn from AWS experts about efficient RAG deployment options for use cases that optimize cloud resource usage and costs. Learn what’s possible when using AWS Graviton to power your RAG-optimized generative AI inference workloads.
Accelerate your AWS Graviton adoption journey
The AWS Graviton Processors are custom designed server processors designed by AWS. They deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in AWS, and help you reduce your carbon footprint. Ready to realize up to 40% better price performance for your workloads? We have curated the following session to help you accelerate your Graviton adoption:
- CMP305 | Learnings from developers adopting AWS Graviton at scale
In this chalk talk, engage directly with AWS specialists that help customers on a daily basis with their adoption journey—from workload selection to running at scale in production. Explore AWS Graviton use cases, best practices, performance, and customer success stories. - CMP310 | Migrating applications to AWS Graviton on Amazon EKS
During this hands-on workshop, walk through the steps for migrating a workload running on x86 to AWS Graviton-based instances including performing tests locally and modifying the CI/CD pipeline to build and deploy the application in Amazon EKS using Karpenter. - CMP316 | AWS Graviton GameDay: Optimize your Amazon EC2 workload with Graviton
Ready to learn more about AWS Graviton in an immersive environment? In this team-based gamified learning setting, perform a live migration of your workload to Graviton. You learn how to unlock Graviton’s full price-performance potential and optimize the size of an Amazon EC2 fleet. - CMP404 | Exploring performance analysis with AWS Graviton instances
In this session, AWS experts open a shell on an Amazon EC2 instance and dig into the system to see which tools and resources you can use, including the Amazon Aperf tool. Learn as they write some mini-applications to study their performance behavior and how to improve them.
Check out workload-specific sessions
Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest compute platform to help you best match the needs of your workload. More SAP, high performance computing (HPC), ML, and Windows workloads run on AWS than any other cloud. Join sessions focused around your specific workload to learn about how you can leverage AWS solutions to accelerate your innovations.
- CMP205 | Launch a secure WordPress site on Amazon Lightsail in minutes
Join this session to learn how to set up a secure and highly available WordPress website on Amazon Lightsail – an easy-to-use virtual private server (VPS). Discover what Amazon Lightsail is, the resources available to create a website, and how to set one up in minutes, all at a predictable monthly cost. - CMP341 | Migrate and modernize your web applications with AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Moving classic web applications to the cloud can be a complex task for customers. In this chalk talk, operators and developers can learn the benefits of using AWS Elastic Beanstalk to upload and deploy web applications in a simplified, fast way and integrate with your existing CI/CD. - CMP213 – Run workloads efficiently on EKS with Karpenter and EC2 Spot Instances
This session covers how Karpenter can help you reduce complexities and improve efficiency in Kubernetes clusters. Explore how to leverage Amazon EC2 Spot Instances as a purchase option, and learn how AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances help further optimize your workloads while improving sustainability. - CMP322 | Amazon EC2 High Memory portfolio for SAP HANA
This session showcases how customers leverage the agility, flexibility and resiliency that AWS High Memory instances provide to help them deploy and scale the infrastructure for SAP HANA deployments while meeting performance and high availability goals. - CMP324 | Protect sensitive data in use with AWS Confidential compute
Confidential computing enables customers to protect code and data from unauthorized access during processing. This session dives into how AWS delivers a combination of hardware- and software-based solutions to deliver confidential computing capabilities. - CMP203 | Drive innovation and results with high performance computing on AWS
In this session, explore how customers across healthcare and life sciences (HCLS) and manufacturing industries are harnessing the convergence of HPC, cloud, and AI on AWS to accelerate time to insights, optimize performance, and drive innovation. - CMP210 | Modernize Apple platform development with AWS and EC2 Mac
Learn about Apple application development in the cloud using EC2 Mac instances and hear firsthand how an AWS customer optimized its Apple development workflow and benefited from Apple application development in the cloud. - CMP302 | Run containerized workloads efficiently on AWS
Containers offer scalability and flexibility, enabling seamless deployment, management, and scaling of applications in any environment. Using containers on AWS can help you improve your efficiency and achieve your price performance goals. - CMP326 | Accelerate AI innovation for health care and life sciences on AWS
Biopharma researchers are looking to build and deploy models such as AlphaFold2, ProtGPT2, and ESM-2 for generative biology and chemistry. In this chalk talk we cover how to deploy NVIDIA BioNeMo on NVIDIA GPU-powered Amazon EC2 instances, AWS ParallelCluster, and Amazon SageMaker. - CMP342 | Scaling 3D content creation with open source technologies
This chalk talk explores 3D Gaussian Splatting as an emergent 3D reconstruction technique and how AWS can accelerate and scale the generation, management, and consumption of digitalized real-world assets in enterprise contexts, from virtual production to immersive commerce. - CMP315 | Creating immersive 3D digital twins from photos, videos, and LiDAR
Join spatial computing specialists as they show you how to build a digital twin in this interactive workshop using NVIDIA Omniverse.
Ready to unlock new possibilities?
The AWS Compute team looks forward to seeing you in Las Vegas. Come meet us at the Compute Booth in the Expo and check out our various Amazon EC2 demos. And if you’re looking for more session recommendations, check-out additional re:Invent attendee guides curated by experts.