My Wednesday at AWS re:Invent 2019

It was early morning today because the alarm clock woke up me around 6 am. The day started with Worldwide Public Sector Keynote talk at 7 am in Venetian Plazzo Ohall.

Worldwide Public Sector Breakfast Keynote – WPS01

This was my first time to take part to the Public Sector keynote. I’m not sure how worldwide it was. At least Singapore and Australia were mentioned, but I cannot remember anything special said about Europe.

Everyone who is following international security industry even a little could not have missed the fact who many cities, communities etc. have faced ransomware attack. Some victims paid the ransom in Bitcoins, some did not pay and many of victims are just quiet. The public cloud environment is a great way to protect your infrastructure and important data. Here is summary how to protect yourself:

The RMIT University from Australia has multiple education programs for AWS competencies and it was announced that they are now official AWS Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC). Typical students have some education background (eg. bachelor in IT) and they want to make some move in job market by re-education. Sounds great way!

The speaker Mr. Martin Bean from the RMIT showed the picture from Jetsons (1963, by Hanna Barber Production) that could already list multiple things that are invented for mass markets much later. Mr. Martin also reminded two things that got my attention: there are more people owning cellphone than toothbrush and 50 percent of jobs are going to transform to another in next 20 years.

Visit to expo area

After keynote I visited expo in Venetian Sands Expo area before heading to the Aria for the rest of Wednesday. The expo was huge, noisy, crowded etc. The more detail experience from last year was enough. At AWS Cloud Cafe I took panorama picture (click to zoom in) and that’s it, I was ready to leave.

I took the shuttle bus towards Aria. I was very happy that the bus driver dropped off us next the main door of Aria hotel which saves about average 20-30 minutes of queueing in Aria’s parking garage. Important change! On the way I passed the Manhattan of New York.

Get started with Amazon ElastiCache in 60 minutes – DAT407

Mr. Kevin McGehee (Principal Software Engineer, AWS) was the instructor for the ElasticCache Redis builder session. In the session we logged in to the Amazon console, opened Cloud9 development environment and then the just followed the clear written instructions.

The guide for builder session can be found from here: https://reinvent2019-elasticache-workshop.s3.amazonaws.com/guide.pdf

This session was about how to import data to the Redis via python and index and refine the data at the importing phase. In refinement the data becomes information with aggregated scoring, geo location etc. It’s easier to use by the requestor. That was interesting and looked easy.

Build an effective resource compliance program – MGT405

Mr.Faraz Kazmi (Software Development Engineer, AWS) held this builder session.

Conformance pack under AWS Config service was published last week. It can be integrated in AWS Organization level in account structure. With conformance packs you can make a group of config rules (~governance rules for common settings) easily in YAML format template and have consolidated view over those rules. There are few AWS managed packs currently available. “Operational Best Practices For PCI-DSS” pack is one for example.  It’s clear that AWS will provide more and more of those rule sets in upcoming months and so will also do the community via Github.

There are timeline view and compliance view of your all resources, so it makes this tool very effective to have consolidated view of compliance of resources.

You can find the material from here: https://reinvent2019.aws-management.tools/mgt405/en/

Btw. If you cannot find Conformance packs, you are possible using old Config service UI in the AWS Console. Make sure to switch to new UI. All new features are only done to the new UI.

The clean-up phase in the guide is not perfect. To addition to the guide you have to manually delete SNS topic and IAM roles that was created in the wizards. It was a disappointment that no sandbox account was provided.

Best practices for detecting and preventing data exposure – MGT408

Ms. Claudia Charro (Enterprise Solutions Architect, AWS) from Brasilia was the teacher in this session. This was very similar to my previous session that I was not aware. In both session we used Config rules and blocked public s3 usages.

The material can be found from here: https://reinvent2019.aws-management.tools/mgt408/en/cont/testingourenforcement.html

AWS Certification Appreciation Reception

The Wednesday evening started (as usually) with reception for certificated people at the Brooklyn Bowl. It is again nice venue to have some food, drinks, music and mingle with other people. I’m writing this around 8 pm so I left a bit early to get good night sleep for Thursday which is the last full day.

Brooklyn bowl outside Brooklyn bowl inside Brooklyn bowl bowling Brooklyn bowl dance floor

On the way back to my hotel (Paris Las Vegas) I found the version 3 Tesla Supercharge station which was the one of the first v3 stations in the world. It was not too crowed. The station was big when I’m comparing with the supercharger stations in Finland. The v3 Supercharger stations can provide up to 250kW charging power for Model 3 Long Range (LR) models, which has 75kWh battery size. I would have like to see the new (experimental) Cybertruck model.

Would you like to hear more what happens in re:Invent 2019? Sign up to our team’s Whatsapp group to chat with them and register to What happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas webinar to hear a whole sum-up after the event.

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