As our last hurrah of 2019, Jonathan and Zoltan jetted off to Vegas for AWS re:Invent!

This immense conference welcomed 65,000 of Amazon Web Services’ customers and partners from across the globe to witness the announcement of 77 new products, features, and services in just 5 days.

The team acted as human sponges, absorbing all of this information to share with our customers and those back at GC HQ. Take a look at Zoltan’s highlights...

2019 highlights

• The ‘Performing analytics at the edge’ workshop demonstrating new ways of collecting telemetry data
• Josh Kahn’s ‘How to use App Sync with alternative data sources’
• Syed Rehan's presentation on ‘building smarter devices for a better life’. We’ve worked on a couple of UK events with Syed and so it was great to hear him speak at this event!
• Andy Jassy’s amazing keynote where he introduced many new services including AI/ML 
• Simith Nambiar’s builder session on a ‘Deep dive with Amazon FreeRTOS’ where we completed an over the air update to an ESP32 MCU
• The workshop on regenerative AI during which we tried out the new AWS DeepComposer. Every participant received one so this is now in the GC office!
• An outstanding presentation by Miro Masat on how to ‘Create digital twins using AWS IoT Core and Amazon Sumerian’
• Dr Werner Vogel's keynote (which we were lucky enough to get into!) where he demonstrated so many great use cases and did a bit of a deep dive into AWS Nitro 
• Building an IoT drink dispenser using an ESP32!
• Another amazing builder session where we used AWS IoT SiteWise to extract and analyse data from real solar panels
• and finally… re:Play which is an EDM concert/playground!

After chatting with Zoltan on his return, it’s clear that his top three takeaways were the volume of learning surrounding embedded programming, how beneficial it can be to use AR/VR solution in industrial IoT, and how to use Greengrass better to maximize its value in future projects. It wasn’t just about the learning though, he met with numerous inspiring folk too, from an IT executive at top US University to the head of IoT at IKEA.

“AWS re:Invent offered an intensive learning and networking environment from which you could only go home empty-handed if you have not moved out of your hotel!”

Beyond the technology

For Jonathan, his two key takeaways from the conference revolved around change and innovation. This is brought to life in his separate thought-provoking post titled ‘AWS re:invent - it's not about the technology’ which you can read here

If you would like to explore AWS re:Invent further, take a look at the videos and slides on the post-event website and we look forward to what the 2020 conference brings!