Hi Folks. Quick post here on some thoughts from Day 1 of AWS re:Invent.

This event is massive. Even well formed plans may need to be adjusted due to popular sessions that are oversubscribed. Even 2 weeks in advance, session reservations were no longer available for most of the sessions I was interested in.

• Walk-Ins are available, but queuing starts up to an hour before the session!
• At Lunch Franck Pachot of Yugabyte and I coordinated a meetup. I’m a big fan of Franck’s educational content and it was great to meet!
• After lunch, I attended a session on the architectural overview of Dow Jones. They split the session into a discussion of their migration to Aurora PostgreSQL and an overview of the Aurora capabilities. It was interesting to hear how they undertook a migration of a 15TB database while minimizing the time needed.
• Later I attended a “quiet” talk via video feed and with headphones. The Braze CTO talked about public company preparedness as a private SaaS startup. This talk was well done and loaded with information.

Although I only made it to a couple of talks, the ones I did attend were at a high level of quality.

I’m now in the Expo Hall which is enormous and planning to check out some vendor booths.

That’s all for Day 1!