AWS Summit 2018, Mumbai

Today, I attended the AWS Cloud Summit in Mumbai. Held at the massive Bombay Exhibition Center, the event would have been attended by over 3000+ participants by my estimates. Overall, there were 6 different tracks for the talks: 

• Build: Building on AWS
• Scale: Scaling your AWS
• Secure: secure your position in the cloud
• Migrate: Migrating from on-prem to Cloud
• Innovate: Innovation with the Cloud
• Impact: Cloud in Public Sector & Education for digital India

Based on my current interests, I figured that Migrate would be far fetched for me, and the talks under Secure seemed completely promotional. So, I made a list of the ones that I liked from the description, and here are the talks that I attended which avoided most conflicts:

• 11:30 – 12:10 <Scale> Optimizing Costs as You Scale on AWS
• 13:30 – 14:10 <Build> Accelerate Business Innovation Using AWS Serverless Technologies
• 14:00 – 14:30 <Impact> Addressing Risk and Compliance in Public Sector
• 14:30 – 15:00 <Impact> Cloud Procurement in Public Sector - Making It Work
• 15:00 – 15:30 <Impact> Smart Cities – The Journey Toward Greater Economic, Social & Environmental Achievement
• 16:00 – 16:40 <Innovate> Building Engaging Voice Experiences with Amazon Alexa
• 17:00 – 17:40 <Innovate> Data Driven Applications with AWS AppSync and GraphQL

You may notice that I attended a few talks from the Impact series as well. I felt that this track is also to mid and large sized organisations which can have elements of bureaucracy in their processes, and hence the content may be relevant. There was one more track on startups, that was in an open lounge setup (rather than conference setup for the others) - but I found the talks in it repetitive and plain copies of what the folks at AWS booths were anyway telling manually.

Since the AWS rep who confirmed my participation informed that registrations would begin at 7.45 AM, I left by 7 AM and managed to be there by 7.35 AM. Even though officially registrations were to start at 8, by the time I went in, the sweatshirts meant for first 1500 participants were over. Though there was more swag from various booths, and one at the end of the conf, so I guess it was ok.

This Summit had over 40 Companies partnering at different level. Some of the renowned ones included: Intel, Vmware, Arista networks, Dell EMC, Druva, Kaspersky Labs, mongoDB, SendGrid, SumoLogic, Talend, Knowlarity, Kuliza

Overall, I found the summit and it talks to be quite informative. My favorite talk, not surprisingly, was the first one: Optimizing Costs as You Scale on AWS. Having worked at multiple startups, and tried my hands at few ideas of my own, I believe AWS costs are something every one tries to optimise sooner or later.

Among the booths, I really enjoyed visiting the ones under innovations. These stalls featured startups which are working on next gen ideas, like Wattman by Zenatix for power consumption analysis, Imaginate for VR conferences, and Scapic for generating AR and VR content. Amongst the AWS booths, the one informing on the EdTech program was really helpful. EdTech is an AWS initiative which helps less than 5 year old EdTech startup get access to credits, communities and senior folks to make their product better. Its live only in the US right now, but will be launched in India soon, and is definitely something to watch out for.