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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.