It's my favorite time of the year again - Christmas tree cakes, fried turkey, and holiday cheer. It also means it's time for re:Invent, which is filled with early Christmas presents. Bond... James Bond... I'll get to that later, by the way, ("Goldeneye" is the best bond movie).

In this blog, I will discuss my favorite things from this year's Festival of Cloud Nerds.I write for the people so I'll cover topics that everyone cares about, such as the best buffet and vegas attraction, along with announcements and sessions, some of which were difficult to get into. So sit back, relax, and enjoy!

Best Product Announcement:

Last year was bedrock which allows you to train LLMs on your own and this year's big one was Q the genai-powered agent. Click here to read Announcement Blog

I love this as I am a big fan of AI agents and outcome/task-driven ai. Now you can hook it up to an s3 bucket or whatever your stack is in AWS and start training LLMs to complete tasks based on internal data. Also embedding locally allows for devops-like tasks like network configuration discovery (when tied into access analyzer) and monitoring metrics/traffic patterns for continuous improvement. This is really fucking cool and I have been waiting on one of the big players to step up in the agent space. Open AI did somewhat by releasing their agent api and gpt store or whatever, but that is a SAAS and external tool that is not native to where your data lives. Q is and I have a ton of ideas on how to implement it in my space.

EXPO Awards-Best of show: DataDog

Hard to miss the branding and effort they put into their booths/attractions. They also have the slide and gianter slide at re:play which is always a lot of fun.

Most Creative: Snowflake

I loved the design and the cabin-like features, it felt very warm and almost like I was in the mountains. Also, my wife works there so I am a little biased :).

More pics from expo:

Best Shirt: Redis really damn fast

75% of my wardrobe is tech shirts from conferences so this is a category I take very seriously. The Redis shirt won well, because, I like to go fast and it says "really damn fast" on the front and really a bunch of times fast, which as a Redis user, I can attest that is an accurate statement.

"If you aint first, your last" ricky bobby

Best Booth Offering: WIZ Krispy Kreme

There was also a donut station right across the way but I love Krispy Kremes. Had I won the 2k from the magic man at Veem, that would have won, but he guessed which hand I had the coin in and I got a 5 dollar Starbucks card instead. Shrugs

Best Meal: Water Grill

I had a fantastic King Salmon and the ceviche there was to die for. Highly recommend
Thank you TRD for the awesome VR event and dinner.

Best Buffet: Breakfast MGM

Best Buffet Goes to MGM as their French toast WAS DANK, and yes that is a cherry mr pibb for breakfast, its vegas YOLO

Best Attraction: Sphere

Although it made me nauseous af and you feel like your about to fall off an edge, it was a cool experience. I would not attend that attraction if you have been knocking a few back or have eaten a fun gummy. I was sober as a whistle and almost threw up, just my two cents.

shoutout to whitecastle rob for the pic as my phone had died walking up

Best Session: How to create a serverless center of excellence SVS214-S

This session was awesome as Capones Senior Distinguished engineer talked about building a center of excellence at scale. My key takeaways were how to collaborate and communicate across organizations and serverless/lambda optimization. Very cool session

Best part overall: Networking and Friends

As is every year, my favorite part of this conference is the networking, conversations, and friends. Being a remote contributor means this is one of the 3 or 4 times a year I get to sync with teammates in person. The conversations you have in the shuttle, the random talks about cost savings and llm use cases, all make this experience memorable. In my next blog I'll get a bit more serious and dive deeper into the announcements and what is on the horizon.