Every year, we look forward to AWS re:Invent. There are always so many reasons to attend, but my top motivation is to learn. As re:Invent goes virtual this year, there are even more great talks happening and it can be hard to decide which to attend.
Whether you’re an SRE, DevOps engineer, infrastructure engineer, or just interested in reliability, here are my top picks for reliability-focused talks.
Week One
Talk: Is your serverless application well-architected?
Why I’m Excited: I love AWS’ Well-Architected Framework, it provides a solid approach to building reliable, scalable, and maintainable applications. If you are looking at learning more about building reliable serverless applications, make sure to put this one in your schedule.
Options to attend:
DEC 3, 2020 | 2:45 PM - 3:15 PM PST
DEC 3, 2020 | 10:45 PM - 11:15 PM PST
DEC 4, 2020 | 6:45 AM - 7:15 AM PST
Talk: Networking best practices & tips with the Well-Architected Framework
Why I’m Excited: It’s always the network! I love sessions that cover tips on making systems more reliable based on real-world scenarios. It usually gives me ideas for Chaos Engineering experiments to run.
Options to attend:
DEC 3, 2020 | 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM PST
DEC 3, 2020 | 7:00 PM - 7:30 PM PST
DEC 4, 2020 | 3:00 AM - 3:30 AM PST
Talk: Go global with AWS multi-Region network services
Why I’m Excited: The path to multi-region can seem complicated and daunting, but the performance and reliability rewards are worth it. I am very excited to learn some best practices in building multi-region VPCs.
Options to attend:
DEC 2, 2020 | 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM PST
DEC 2, 2020 | 7:00 PM - 7:30 PM PST
DEC 3, 2020 | 3:00 AM - 3:30 AM PST
Talk: Looking at Amazon EKS through a networking lens
Why I’m Excited: I’m an avid EKS user, but cluster networking is one of the more difficult areas to master. I love learning how to improve my clusters while making them cost-efficient and reliable.
Options to attend:
DEC 2, 2020 | 12:30 PM - 1:00 PM PST
DEC 2, 2020 | 8:30 PM - 9:00 PM PST
DEC 3, 2020 | 4:30 AM - 5:00 AM PST
Week Two
Talk: Incident management in a distributed organization
Why I’m Excited: I go to re:Invent to learn mostly technology-related concepts, but this one of the culture talks I am very eager to attend. With COVID, many organizations have a hard time restructuring their processes for handling incidents to be remote-friendly. I’m also very excited about what they will cover around post-incident learning.
Options to attend:
DEC 8, 2020 | 9:45 AM - 10:15 AM PST
DEC 8, 2020 | 5:45 PM - 6:15 PM PST
DEC 9, 2020 | 1:45 AM - 2:15 AM PST
Talk: Mistakes were made, lessons were learned (sponsored by Trend Micro)
Why I’m Excited: As an SRE and Chaos Engineer, I’m always looking for those moments where I can learn from others failures.
Options to attend:
DEC 9, 2020 | 7:15 AM - 7:45 AM PST
DEC 9, 2020 | 3:15 PM - 3:45 PM PST
DEC 9, 2020 | 11:15 PM - 11:45 PM PST
Talk: Testing software and systems at Amazon
Why I’m Excited: As Gremlin’s founders can attest, operating reliably at Amazon’s scale is not easy. I am intrigued to learn about Amazon’s proactive approach to testing that includes Chaos Engineering.
Options to attend:
DEC 9, 2020 | 12:30 PM - 1:00 PM PST
DEC 9, 2020 | 8:30 PM - 9:00 PM PST
DEC 10, 2020 | 4:30 AM - 5:00 AM PST
Talk: Monitoring and troubleshooting network traffic
Why I’m Excited: AWS has had some nice out of the box tooling with their infrastructure offerings. It will be nice to learn about their VPC Monitoring and Traffic Mirroring that helps teams keep systems up and running.
Options to attend:
DEC 10, 2020 | 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM PST
DEC 10, 2020 | 10:30 PM - 11:00 PM PST
DEC 11, 2020 | 6:30 AM - 7:00 AM PST
Talk: Building resilient Kubernetes deployments with AWS App Mesh
Why I’m Excited: I don’t have any experience with AWS’s App Mesh, but it’s something I’m curious to learn more about as I have a bit of experience with what they run under the hood for their proxy, Envoy.
Options to attend:
DEC 10, 2020 | 7:30 AM - 8:00 AM PST
DEC 10, 2020 | 3:30 PM - 4:00 PM PST
DEC 10, 2020 | 11:30 PM - 12:00 AM PST
Week Three
Talk: Get it right the first time: Production-ready prototypes
Why I’m Excited: Infrastructure as Code is the way to go for building production systems. I haven’t played with AWS Solutions Constructs, but as an avid user of other IAC solutions, I’m excited to learn from the experts with this solution.
Options to attend:
DEC 15, 2020 | 11:15 AM - 11:45 AM PST
DEC 15, 2020 | 7:15 PM - 7:45 PM PST
DEC 16, 2020 | 3:15 AM - 3:45 AM PST
Talk: Testing resiliency using chaos engineering
Why I’m Excited: As a Chaos Engineer, this a must-attend for me! I always enjoy hearing other folks that work in this space talk about it. I’m also interested to learn more about this topic from the cloud provider’s point of view.
Options to attend:
DEC 17, 2020 | 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM PST
DEC 17, 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:00 PM PST
DEC 18, 2020 | 2:30 AM - 3:00 AM PST
Talk: Adrian Cockcroft’s architecture trends and topics for 2021
Why I’m Excited: Adrian has always been sharing knowledge on making sure we architect reliable software. I am very excited to hear his thoughts on trends for next year. He is also a great and fun speaker. I got to share the re:Invent stage with him a few years ago.
Options to attend:
DEC 17, 2020 | 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM PST
DEC 17, 2020 | 10:00 PM - 10:30 PM PST
DEC 18, 2020 | 6:00 AM - 6:30 AM PST
Talk: Thomson Reuters, cloud migration & modern tools to manage tech operations (sponsored by PagerDuty)
Why I’m Excited: One of my favorite parts of working in DevOps is the focus on making a culture change a part of transformations. It will be great to listen to Thomson Reuter’s experience on their cloud migration and how PagerDuty helped their process.
Options to attend:
DEC 17, 2020 | 10:15 AM - 10:45 AM PST
DEC 17, 2020 | 6:15 PM - 6:45 PM PST
DEC 18, 2020 | 2:15 AM - 2:45 AM PST
Talk: Going global in minutes: Multi-Region expansion simplified
Why I’m Excited: It can be very daunting to think about going multi-region, but the case studies teach us otherwise. I’m thrilled to hear Autodesk talk about their experience in this process and the lessons learned that others can replicate or avoid.
Options to attend:
DEC 15, 2020 | 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM PST
DEC 15, 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:00 PM PST
DEC 16, 2020 | 2:30 AM - 3:00 AM PST
Talk: Increase availability with AWS observability solutions
Why I’m Excited: I’ve used AWS CloudWatch and Container Insights to help me monitor my systems. I’m excited to focus on how CloudWatch and X-Ray help one focus on improving availability.
Options to attend:
DEC 15, 2020 | 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM PST
DEC 15, 2020 | 10:30 PM - 11:00 PM PST
DEC 16, 2020 | 6:30 AM - 7:00 AM PST
Talk: Migrating your on-premises resources to the cloud
Why I’m Excited: Moving from on-prem to the cloud can be challenging and seems like it will never happen. It gets tough when one looks for 1:1 alternatives. I’m excited to learn about other ways to simplify these conversations and decisions.
Options to attend: DEC 15, 2020 | 10:45 AM - 11:15 AM PST
DEC 15, 2020 | 6:45 PM - 7:15 PM PST
DEC 16, 2020 | 2:45 AM - 3:15 AM PST
Looking to chat about these sessions with other attendees? Join the #awsreinvent channel in the Chaos Engineering Community Slack. For tips on how to balance all of these great sessions along with work and personal life, check out our other blog post.
Don’t forget to stop by the Gremlin Booth, where you can learn more about Chaos Engineering and play to win a Sonos 5.
