AWS attendee guide for Open Source at re:Invent 2021

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. Open source is a huge part of AWS and it is also a huge part of re:Invent. We can’t wait to show you the amazing open source work that is happening and to share the latest from AWS leaders and community. re:Invent is happening in person in Las Vegas (November 29-December 3) and virtually (November 29–December 10). If you are attending in person, please review the health and safety details on the re:Invent health measures page. If you are joining us virtually, please look at the virtual section.

This year, open source has a dedicated track, talking about the active work happening across AWS (and beyond)! Just as open source isn’t limited to one technology area, our track covers a wide range of focus areas and goes from intermediate (200) to advanced (300). In this post, we’ll give you a preview of what you should put on your personal schedule!

Breakout Sessions

AWS re:Invent breakout sessions are lecture-style and one hour long. These sessions are delivered by AWS experts and they typically include 10–15 minutes of Q&A at the end. For our virtual attendees, breakout sessions will be made available on-demand in the week after re:Invent.

Level 200 – Intermediate

• OPN201 – How Apache Lucene’s community build merge-on-refresh

  This session provides an on-the-ground look at the inner workings of modern open-source development by following a significant, complex change from inception to release. In 2020, Amazon completed a multiyear migration of its customer-facing product search engine onto a new service based on Apache Lucene, supported by many AWS services. In production, Amazon observed Lucene’s segmented nature influencing query latency and had an idea to reduce its segment count. The idea seemed simple, but its realization, through close collaboration with the Lucene developer community, took nearly a year! This session dives deep into this journey.

• OPN204 – Introduction to GraphQL

  GraphQL is an open-source API query language. This session provides an introduction to GraphQL theory and practice. Learn the three superpowers of GraphQL, how GraphQL compares to REST API, and how to take GraphQL into production.

• OPN207 – Top 10 observability challenges and how open source can help

  When building and operating cloud-native applications, such as containerized microservices in Kubernetes or serverless applications, you don’t want to proceed by guesswork. In other words, you want to capture and collect all relevant signals (logs, metrics, traces) from your applications and infrastructure so that you can act upon it in a timely manner. This is called observability. In this session, you learn how open source can help with the top challenges in this space, including signal correlation, portability, and providing a single pane of glass.

Level 300 – Advanced

• OPN301 – Using Rust to minimize environmental impact

  Rust is one of the most energy-efficient and safe programming languages. With Rust, it may be possible to reduce the environmental impact of the IT industry by 50% and prevent 70% of all high-severity CVEs. In this session, dive into the “super powers” of Rust, hear about the work ahead to give those powers to every engineer, and hear the ways you can contribute.

• OPN307 – OpenSearch: Building the future of search together

  OpenSearch is a new community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite that makes it easy to securely ingest, search, and analyze data. In this session, dive deep into how OpenSearch was created. Gain insight into new functionalities being built for OpenSearch, including improved performance and reliability, lower cost at scale, observability analytics, machine learning capabilities, and extensibility enhancements designed to enable anyone to build and share their own OpenSearch products and features.

• OPN308 – ML with Metaflow and Kubernetes: Prototype to production on Amazon EKS

  Data science is hard. At AWS re:Invent 2019, Netflix addressed the data science challenge by open-sourcing Metaflow, their human-centric framework for data science. Two years and 4,400+ GitHub stars later, Metaflow is helping other organizations standardize their data science pipelines and seamlessly move from prototype to production. However, a wider array of users results in a need for wider infrastructure support, and Metaflow is there to meet users where they are. This session explores data science pipelines on Amazon EKS and other open platforms and details how Metaflow is bringing its human-centric vision to the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Builders’ Sessions

Builders Sessions are small-group sessions led by an AWS expert who guides you as you work with an open source technology. Each builders’ session begins with a short explanation or demonstration of what you are going to build. Once the demonstration is complete, use your laptop to experiment and build with the AWS expert.

Level 300 – Advanced

• OPN305 – Securing your OpenSearch data

  OpenSearch provides advanced security features not only for authorization, authentication, and encryption but also for fine-grained access control. In this builders’ session, build out an example that secures your data at the field level and document level. Also, learn how to mask data and use OpenSearch Dashboard tenancy.

• OPN315 – Build a PostgreSQL database cluster with Babelfish

  Babelfish for PostgreSQL adds a Microsoft SQL Server-compatible endpoint to a PostgreSQL database cluster. This enables your PostgreSQL database to understand the SQL Server wire protocol and commonly used SQL Server statements. With Babelfish, applications that were originally built for SQL Server can work directly with PostgreSQL with little to no code changes and without changing database drivers. In this builders’ session, learn how to create a new PostgreSQL database cluster with Babelfish support, configure and connect to the new database, migrate a simple SQL Server database to the new database, and test a simple application.

• OPN316 – Prometheus and Grafana: Integrated metrics, logs, and traces

  In this builders’ session, dive deep into how Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) automatically scales as your workloads grow or shrink and integrates with AWS security services to enable fast and secure access to data. Then, discover how Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG) can be used to analyze your metrics, logs, and traces without having to provision servers, configure and update software, and do the heavy lifting involved in securing and scaling Grafana in production.

Chalk Talks

Chalk Talks are highly interactive sessions with a small audience. Experts help you to understand open source solutions on a digital whiteboard as the discussion unfolds. Each begins with a short lecture (10–15 minutes) delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a 45- or 50-minute Q&A session with the audience.

Level 200 – Intermediate

• OPN202-R1 and OPN202-R2 – Babelfish architecture and design

  Babelfish for PostgreSQL adds a Microsoft SQL Server-compatible endpoint to a PostgreSQL database cluster. This enables your PostgreSQL database to understand the SQL Server wire protocol and commonly used SQL Server statements. With Babelfish, applications that were originally built for SQL Server can work directly with PostgreSQL with little to no code changes and without changing database drivers. In this interactive chalk talk, we provide an overview of the Babelfish architecture, explain the design of its major components, and step through the complete infrastructure.

• OPN205-R1 and OPN205-R2 – Construct Hub: An open-source catalog for CDK libraries

  Construct Hub makes discovering CDK construct libraries more efficient with a searchable index of all CDK packages available from package managers like npm, PyPI, and NuGet. After you find an interesting construct library, you can quickly get started by using polyglot documentation and code snippets. Join this chalk talk to learn how to publish your own construct libraries on Construct Hub. Construct Hub is developed as open source and delivered as a CDK construct, so this chalk talk covers the power of the construct programming model (CPM) and demonstrates how AWS used it to create Construct Hub.

• OPN206 – Getting started as a Bottlerocket contributor

  Bottlerocket is a minimal, secure, Linux-based, container-optimized operating system. It is an open-source system, and its developers love collaborating with their contributors. In this chalk talk, explore how you can start contributing to Bottlerocket, learn how you can use developer tooling to build and test a potential contribution, and hear some examples of developer interactions with contributors.

Level 300 – Advanced

• OPN303-R1 and OPN303-R2 – Upgrade to OpenSearch

  There are multiple ways to migrate from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch. In this chalk talk, we will explore different migration approaches (for example, rolling upgrades and cluster restart upgrades), when to use them, and other considerations when migrating to OpenSearch.

• OPN303-R1 and OPN303-R2 – Working in the open with OpenSearch

  Interested in working in open source but not sure what it’s like or how to get started? This chalk talk dives deep into the OpenSearch code base as a concrete example to discuss best practices for working on a large-scale open-source project. Gain a better understanding of the challenges and techniques of open-source development and an increased excitement to become a part of this fast-growing community.

• OPN309-R1 and OPN309-R2 – AWS SaaS Boost vNext: Enabling new patterns and extensibility

  AWS SaaS Boost provides developers with a ready-made, open-source model for building and operating SaaS solutions on AWS. In an effort to enrich this offering, AWS plans to add support for a more diverse range of SaaS architectures, extensibility options, and third-party integrations. In this chalk talk, dive deep into the AWS SaaS Boost vNext vision for enabling new use cases, customization strategies, and application packaging models. The goal is to provide an end-to-end review of the key architecture considerations designed to enable AWS SaaS Boost to support a richer, more configurable development experience for greenfield and migration SaaS scenarios.

• OPN311 – Build your AWS Cloud-connected embedded Linux OS faster

  Thanks to the open-source meta-aws project, your custom-built embedded Linux distributions can now include and verify embedded device solutions even faster. The meta-aws project, which is software for the Yocto Project and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), composes a set of recipes that accelerate the installation and configuration of AWS device software. In this chalk talk, learn from a meta-aws maintainer about the project scope, goals for the next year, and examples of how the project helps embedded users build faster on AWS.

• OPN312 – Building a multi-architecture CI/CD pipeline for Kubernetes

  In this chalk talk, learn how to design, build, and monitor a fully multi-architecture container-image pipeline for CI/CD. Leveraging multiple architectures, including AWS Graviton2-based instances, allows you to cost- and performance-optimize your compute infrastructure and future-proof your workloads. Explore best practices and tips and tricks, and learn solutions to common questions around deploying multi-architecture images within Kubernetes.

Workshops

Level 300 – Advanced

• OPN304-R1 and OPN304-R2 – Async Rust: Hurry up and .await!

  Async Rust enables building efficient and reliable networking services. However, its learning curve can be steep, and “gotchas” can catch even experienced Rust developers. This workshop, aimed at intermediate and expert Rust developers (either with or without async experience) dives into async programming in Rust. Learn the operational model for async, discuss some common pitfalls that developers encounter, and explore tools for resolving correctness and performance problems.

• OPN313 – When life hands you data, grab OpenSearch

  Whether you have structured or unstructured data, keywords or blocks of full text, OpenSearch is a useful tool that delivers relevant search results, insights from your logs, performance for your application, and observability for your platform. In this workshop, learn how to deploy an OpenSearch cluster on Kubernetes that backs a search-based application. Then, flow logs from your application and cluster to OpenSearch and build out dashboards to monitor your application’s performance, user interaction, and the cluster’s metrics.

• OPN314 – Dive deep into cross-SDK features on AWS

  In this workshop, learn best practices for usage patterns of AWS SDKs. Using your preferred language’s SDK (Java, JavaScript, Go, or Python) walk through real-world exercises to better understand how you can leverage shared SDK functionality to build your application. Exercises cover usage of waiters, paginators, shared configuration, and other high-level utilities. Learn from SDK engineers about how you can make the most of these cross-SDK features.

Beyond the track

But wait, there’s more! There are opportunities to learn and engage with open source at re:Invent beyond the Open Source track.

• Code Green! is an all-day sustainability data hackathon and workshop (HJS304) where builders get to solve a sustainability-related technical challenge. Entries use sustainability data available in the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) or the AWS Data Exchange. In the spirit of collaborating to help solve the global climate crisis, all submitted code for this hackathon will be open source. This happens Monday, November 29, from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM.
• The First Annual AWS BugBust re:Invent Challenge will give you an opportunity to showcase your bug fixing skills in open source codebases to win prizes and glory. Challengers will work on community Python and Java open source code and compete to fix as many software bugs as possible. You can pre-register now.
• AWS Open Source will have a demo kiosk in the AWS Developer Lounge (Booth #1163) on the re:Invent expo floor (Monday through Thursday). Come see AWS experts, AWS Community Heroes, and AWS Community Builders show you the latest open source projects that they’re working on.
• Finally, join us for Open Source After Dark on Tuesday, November 30! No stress, no presentations, no pitches, just an evening networking with peers. We’ve got a lot of fun surprises lined up, you do not want to miss this party. There will be beverages, appetizers, entertainment, swag and more! Space is limited – RSVP to secure your spot today.