from Dino Bektas
Cloud Engineer, from Berne

Cloud native ist Dino’s Welt! In der Cloud Native Umgebung fühlt sich Dino Zuhause! Er hat bereits etliche IaC-unterstützte Architekturen für verschiedenste Anwendungen erstellt und kennt deren Besonderheiten. Dino ist zertifiziert in:

AWS DevOps Engineer Professional
AWS Developer Associate
AWS SysOps Administrator Associate
AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Hashicorp Terraform Associate

Recap

My AWS re:Invent 2022 Highlights

After a virtual-only event in 2020 and a scaled-down edition in 2021, AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas took place for the 11th time in December 2022 with over 50,000 attendees and 1,500 technical sessions. Amanox Solutions has been a regular participant at re:Invent since 2015, so 2022 was no exception. I am Dino Bektas, Senior Solutions Architect and Pre-Sales Representative of Public Cloud Team at Amanox Solutions AG and together with my colleagues Daniel Heinzmann and Fabian Brunner we attended this great event. This is my personal AWS re:Invent 2022 recap.

To compensate a bit for the jet lag Daniel, Fabian and I arrived in Las Vegas a few days before the actual start of the conference. We had decided to book one of the most famous hotels in Las Vegas, the Hotel Mirage. However, we did not know that the NFR Las Vegas 2022 rodeo show was taking place in the same week. Thus, the Hotel Mirage was accordingly full of cowboys and cowgirls, and even though we didn't have much luck playing cards against them, we still felt like we were in a Western movie.

I was very excited and anxious to see what AWS had prepared for us this year. I was expecting technical innovations and wanted to feel the pulse of where the cloud market is headed in the near future.

There were many session blockers which had to find their own place in my schedule. At this point, it's important to mention that there were over 1500 total sessions to choose from that week. Some of them were more technical, while others were more geared towards startups, founders and managers. There were also sessions that were just for sharing experiences, insights, and the direction that AWS cloud technologies are headed in the foreseeable future.

So, in the end, my calendar for the week was appropriately well filled with appointments, although the many in-person 1:1 meetings that I was happy to attend were not even in it due to their spontaneous nature.

We were able to make the best use of the free time between the sessions for all the entertaining activities and offerings that happened all around. For example, at the informal get-together with lively exchange in the Jam Lounge or in the coffee and content hub areas. But also strolling through the Expo was very interesting and also gave us the opportunity to collect a few more SWAGs along the way.

Besides the, for me generally very inspiring meetings and getting to know existing and potential partners from all over the world, especially the exchange of ideas with other partners from the AWS DACH region and meeting with colleagues from Southern Europe, especially the Balkan region, was one of the biggest highlights for me.

In terms of technical innovations, my explorations of Application Composer, Code Catalyst and Code Whisperer, as well as VPC Lattice Services were the most interesting for me. Also because we can implement these services with our existing customers.

Furthermore, there were also some updates with AWS RedShift Data Warehouse and Event Bridge Services, which are extremely interesting and helpful for our Data Lakes projects.

My personal product highlights of the AWS re:Invent 2022

Application
Composer

Visually composing serverless applications
Generating IaC from a diagram
Maintaining infrastructure model based on the diagram and IaC that follows best practices
Share your infrastructure diagram with colleagues and improve entire application by modifying an existing diagram

Code
Catalyst

Unified software development service
Fully managed by AWS, thus allowing clients to focus on development
Availability of blueprints ready to spin up in matter of few minutes
Ability to integrate your development environment in cloud with your preferred local IDE
Easily setup your CI/CD for your code execution

Code
Whisperer

Think Github Co-pilot
ML-powered managed service
Allows for suggestions and code snippet recommendations based on comments in natural language and codebase in an IDE
Ability to generate entire code blocks and functions without having to search web for it
No need to leave IDE working tabs since all recommendations for Java, Python and JavaScript will be provided inside an IDE

VPC Lattice
Services

Application Layer service
Ability to simplify service-to-service connectivity at scale
Allows for enhanced application level security
Ability to implement granular traffic controls
Allows for visibility in service-to-service interactions

Would you like to learn more about the products mentioned above? Feel free to send me an e-mail.

The only thing that disappointed us a bit among all the great impressions, innovations and surprising moments of this all-around successful event was the lack of AWS certification stickers. After all, we had been looking forward to collecting some for our colleagues in Bern and Zurich, because we knew they would have been very happy to receive their certification stickers after having performed well and received corresponding AWS certifications last year. In the end, however, we were only able to grab a few AWS Practitioner and Developer stickers.

Nevertheless, it was a very exciting and educational time at AWS re:Invent 2022 and I am grateful to have been a part of this amazing event.

Finally, we decided spontaneously to spend another week in the US after AWS re:Invent. So, besides attending the NBA game in Salt Lake City, we also spent some great and impressive days in Zion National Park in the state of Utah, which was definitely the biggest highlight of the second week.

If you have any questions about AWS and re:Invent 2022, please feel free to contact me (), Daniel Heinzmann () or Matthias Imsand ().

About the author

The author Dino Bektas successfully fulfills the role of Senior Solutions Architect and Pre-Sales Representative of Public Cloud Team at Amanox Solutions AG. He has been with Amanox Solutions AG for 5 years and is one of the most experienced AWS cracks. As a lead, he supports customers such as Swiss Post, SBB Cargo, Alpiq, and Tamedia.

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