AWS Sydney Summit Recap 2019

As promised, however a little late, my recap.

AWS Sydney Summit for me comprised of 4 conferences.

• AWS Partner Summit
• AWS Ambassador Forum
• AWS Innovation Summit
• AWS Summit

AWS Partner Summit

My monday morning was spent watching a few presentations.

Main take away from the morning is that Partners still need to consider specialising in AWS Products and going deep.  “Do it with Depth”.
Customers want partners with deep understanding not a cursory one. They want the “vendors” aka Accenture etc to come with IP already was a point made by NAB.

DXC was given a healthy mention as the came to NAB with a container solution that solved the legacy OS upgrade path without actually upgrading the OS.

Another main point was to consider the Customer Experience yes year. This meant to add the CMO into the mix alongside the CIO.

AWS strongly urged APN Partners to challenge them more and reminded APN is about helping Partners build their business.

When it came to partners working with partners Steve Days take away comment was: “Put customer obsessed ouctomes ahead of sthort term goals no matter how small the revenue is and customers will reward you”.

Ambassador Forum

This was mostly NDA things I cannot share unfortunatley however there were some roadmap Items I’ll make another post about so keep an eye out for that one.

Innvoation Summit

The primary take away from this summit was AI is fully inbound and again CX should be used more. If you haven’t started looking into AI then you should be.

AWS Connect – the call center product was a definate topic.

We were also show cased Little Ripper in the keynote which was a great innovation using AI on the video feed off a drone to identify Sharks.  Some cool stuff going on there! 

Was great to see Glen Gore on stage also! 🙂

ASW Summit – Day 1

I skipped the keynote for this day and headed into the expo floor firs tup before any sessions. I spent 2 hours in the dev chat lab going over 3 labs:

• Serverless Applications with Amplify
• Serverless Applications with SAM
• Transit Gateway

I did spend some time harrassing the labs teams about their labs and through this conversing found out that one can install Cloud9 manually on an EC2 instance so whilst it may not be in Sydney currently you can actually get it to go and enjoy the benefits of Cloud9.

The Transit Gateway lab was too simple in reality. After peeling back the hood I had a question regarding why their squid Proxy had 2 Nics on it which they couldn’t answer up front. WOrking it out the reason was because they were operating 3 subnets with teh TGW in the third so the proxy server had to have a leg in that subnet as well for routing purposes.

I went to a session around Sumarian VR Concierge that was good. It tied in the user story of a company that didnt really man their front desk because all their staff were down the other end of the warehouse they worked in so the virtual concierge was a great asset. It used a deep lens and was integrated into Slack as a workflow.  Was a good presentation.

I also wento check in on CISCOs network security tool which I’ll expand on in another blog post. It was quite nice and comes with a 60 day free trial. THe short of it is, it tries to track all the actors on the network and their normal communications and using AI detect anomolous behaviour.  Quite nice.

AWS Summit – Day 2

I have to profess. I spent half my time on Deep Racer. I rocked up after the keynote at around 10:30am only to be left wanting for another 20 minutes before the door opened thus not giving me any time to try before the 11am workshop.

So I ditched the 11am workshop and just had a go instead.  Deep Racer has 3 models you can choose from so I went with Center Line.  I managed a 33.40s time around the lap!  However my customer beat me with a 29.90s time. Sub 30. wasn’t happy so after visiting the expo floor for 30 I went back for another try.

After another massive wait to get a go I managed to score 17s with model #2!  Stoked! That placed me as #30 on the leaderboard however by the end of the day I had been bumped to 47.  AFter going to the workshop I’m a little wiser on the training model and have since learnt that one can run sagemaker locally to train ones model!

Something to look into for sure as you can sign up for the virtual leagues on the other summits and if you win you will get a free ticket to Re:Invent.

In Summary

I had a blast. I saw some great presentations, talked to a lot of vendors and reviewed a couple of new products, had some learnings on the labs and met some great people including Jim and Mac and the local AWS team that support Accenture.

The overall the main take aways for me were that AWS want more partners to push CX tools in APAC and that AI is really becomming a tool everyone can use, oh and Deep Racer is good fun 🙂

Wonder if I can wangle a re:invent this year also 🙂