re:Invent 2024 Session Guide
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re:Invent 2024 is almost upon us! It’s almost time for 60k+ like-minded people to descend on the Las Vegas strip and immerse themselves in AWS for a week. Reservations opened for sessions this week and whilst many sessions’ registration list will be full already, there’s always capacity held back for walk-ups. There’s also the chance that people re-arrange their schedule, so it’s worth favouriting sessions and keeping an eye on the availability.
Over the course of the week, there’s thousands of sessions scheduled of varying types. It’s impossible to go to all of them, so you’ll have to be selective on what topics, as well as what conference venues, you focus on. The section of the Las Vegas strip that re:Invent takes over is around 4 miles end-to-end, so consider travel times between sessions. There’s plenty of re:Invent survival guides published online - one I’ve seen recently that stands out is Jimmy Dahlqvist’s. Jimmy is a fellow AWS Ambassador, new AWS Hero and all-round great guy. I strongly recommend you give it a read!
I’ve included the session descriptions verbatim from the re:Invent session catalog - this way you can hear straight from the speakers what the goal of the session is. I’ve also included the session code, so you can easily find and favourite them.
Pillars
Let’s break down my session recommendations into logical categories (plus some generic categories) - what better categories to use than the Well-Architected Framework pillars! Let’s go!
From the AWS Cloud Optimization Success and Well-Architected Team
Who better to learn about optimising AWS and the best practices in the Well-Architected Framework from than the AWS team dedicated to the topic? The sessions highlighted in this section are delivered by members of that team and will be a great place to start.
ARC313: Balancing resilience, security, and cost in cloud architecture 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Duncan Bell, Nataliya Godunok
As organizations develop cloud infrastructure, they must balance resilience, security, and cost optimization in their architectures. This talk explores the complex relationships between these priorities, providing a framework for informed decision-making. Participants learn resilience strategies like multi-Region deployments; security measures for identity, access, and data protection; and cost optimization techniques using cost-effective services and resource utilization. Using real-world case studies, assess your organization's needs and make strategic architectural decisions that align with business objectives. By navigating the tradeoffs between resilience, security, and cost, learn to design reliable, secure, and cost-effective cloud systems.
SUP306: Elevate your cloud operations with an efficient governance strategy 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Alastair Bate, Nataliya Godunok
As you grow and scale your cloud adoption, you need to build a robust governance strategy that seamlessly integrates technology, people, and processes. This chalk talk offers actionable insights on how to streamline your multi-account vending, build efficient and fault-tolerant workloads, and maintain control while effectively managing your AWS costs. Learn how to utilize AWS Trusted Advisor to make informed architectural decisions to ensure your workloads are cost-efficient, performant, secure, and resilient. Explore how services such as AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower can transform your cloud operations using AWS Well-Architected best practices.
SUP201: Building an optimized cloud workload with AWS 200 – Intermediate
Breakout session - Rovan Omar, Stephen Salim, Rodrigo Castillo
Like constructing a bridge, building a cloud workload requires careful consideration of design and materials to ensure it meets the desired qualities and effectively supports the intended business outcomes. Join this session to learn how to use the AWS Well-Architected Framework to determine the set of qualities a cloud workload needs to deliver an optimal business outcome, using services like AWS Health, AWS Trusted Advisor, and many others. Gain insights from an Australian multinational bank, Commonwealth Bank, in addressing their architecture challenges, using AWS Well-Architected to keep their cloud architecture robust, secure, and cost-effective.
ARC206: Architectural best practices throughout the lifecycle 200 – Intermediate
Breakout session - Bradley Acar
In this session, learn how to integrate architectural best practices at every stage of your workload’s lifecycle. Explore the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which helps customers discover and implement best practices around operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and sustainability. Further, learn how to integrate AWS Trusted Advisor to continuously monitor your workloads for adherence to best practices. Finally, learn how to integrate with AWS Health to improve your incident detection time and application resilience. This session holds appeal for architects, CCoE leaders, and builders.
ARC209: Cloud optimization at scale: Building efficient AWS architectures 200 – Intermediate
Chalk talk - Jang Whan Han, Bradley Acar
As you grow your cloud adoption, you need to implement a robust governance strategy that seamlessly integrates technology, people, and processes. By designing sustainable, automated, and efficient architectures from the start, and by embracing a culture of continuous improvement, not only can you optimize your cloud usage but also drive innovation. This chalk talk offers actionable insights and practical tips on how to streamline your multi-account management, boost efficiency, and maintain control, while balancing cost, performance, and resiliency in your architectures. Explore how to transform your cloud operations using AWS Well-Architected best practices.
SUP304: Building resilient systems in a globally connected world 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Michael Fischer, Arvind Raghunathan
Modern IT workloads are more complex than ever—even the simplest application may have hundreds of external dependencies. Recent events have shown how failure of even a single component can cause dramatic planetary-scale disruption, with impacts in the millions or even billions of dollars. In this interconnected world, reliability is more important than ever. Whether you’re an IT vendor or a customer, learn the key best practices from AWS Well-Architected for building and operating integrated systems that prevent critical errors and can tolerate and quickly recover from a broad variety of faults.
COP314: Evaluate risk and automate remediation in your AWS environment 300 – Advanced
Builders' session - Carlos Perez, Paul Dyar, Duncan Bell, Craig Edwards, Mohamed Al Omar
In today's fast-paced cloud computing landscape, organizations face numerous challenges in maintaining a secure, efficient, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure. AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful tool that helps mitigate risks and optimize resource utilization, ensuring compliance with Well-Architected best practices and industry standards. This builders’ session dives deep into the capabilities of Trusted Advisor, exploring its various checks and recommendations tailored to different aspects of cloud management. Learn how to effectively utilize Trusted Advisor's features, such as automatic checks, customizable alerts, and actionable recommendations, to proactively identify and address potential risks within your AWS environments.
Applicable to all Pillars
TNC206: Are you well-architected? 200 – Intermediate
Breakout session -
Most businesses depend on a portfolio of technology solutions to operate and be successful every day. How do you know if you and your team are following best practice or what the risks in your architectures might be? In this session, learn how the AWS Well-Architected Framework provides prescriptive architectural advice and how the AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you measure and improve your technology portfolio.
NET202: Design well-architected networks on AWS 200 – Intermediate
Breakout session - Dmitry Figol, Andrew Gray, Radek Podedworny
Elevate your AWS networking expertise by learning how to design well-architected networks on AWS. This session starts with the tradeoffs of multi-AZ and multi-Region architectures and how to build an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Next, it explores design challenges when connecting multiple VPCs and on-premises datacenters, followed by a discussion on building a scalable DNS infrastructure on AWS. Finally, we will consider several common network architecture patterns on AWS, such as application ingress and egress. Leave equipped with the insights needed to create resilient, secure, and scalable network infrastructure on AWS.
Security
COP342: Top controls for a secure, well-architected environment 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - David Hu, Gaurav Gupta, Alex Torres
Organizations of all sizes must implement robust controls to mitigate risks and operate a well-architected environment. Discover top recommended controls that can help you achieve your governance, compliance, and security objectives. Learn how to leverage AWS services like AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, AWS Config, and AWS Security Hub to centrally define, enforce, and monitor policies across your environment. Explore strategies to establish comprehensive access controls, prevent misconfigurations, and gain visibility into your security posture. Understand how to adapt controls as your environment evolves, while addressing emerging threats and changing business requirements.
NET303: Approaches to layered security on Amazon VPC 300 – Advanced
Workshop - Kimberley Clements, Matt Johnson
In this workshop, discover practical guidance that can help you build a secure Amazon VPC. Using a hands-on approach, review Amazon VPC features such as subnets, security groups, flow logs, and routing. Then, learn how you can add on additional layers of security and how to securely ingress and egress VPC traffic with other services, such as Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, AWS Network Firewall, Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring, AWS WAF, and more. You must bring your laptop to participate.
COP407: Coding for proactive controls with AWS CloudFormation 400 – Expert
Code talk - Ben Perak, David Killmon
As organizations increasingly embrace cloud-native architectures and deploy applications at scale, robust security controls become paramount. In this code talk, experts discuss security best practices using AWS CloudFormation Hooks and AWS CloudFormation Guard. You learn how to write Guard DSL rules, which can be used for static template validation and integration with CloudFormation Hooks and as AWS Config custom rules.
SEC405: Consolidated data protection insights with generative AI 400 – Expert
Code talk - Alex Goff, Svenja Moehring
To prevent data loss and data leakage, security leaders want to understand how their data is encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) across all accounts, including legacy accounts and partner-managed accounts. You might wonder, “When was a KMS key last used?” or “Which resources does the key protect?” This code talk presents a modular, extendable, and readily usable solution using natural language queries with Amazon Q in QuickSight to get answers to such questions. This allows you to validate with more confidence that you can delete a key, identify unused resources, and find resources with data protection gaps.
SEC403: Generative AI for security in the real world 400 – Expert
Breakout session - Matt Saner, Brad Dispensa
Generative AI use cases for the business world abound, but what about use cases for security practitioners? This session dives into real world examples of generative AI use cases for solving security challenges. This session covers specific examples, such as red team/blue team, incident response, and SOC use cases. Learn about the solutions that you can deploy to amplify the impact of your security operators.
SEC339: Mitigating OWASP Top 10 CI/CD security risks using AWS services 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Daniel Begimher, Pat Gaw
In October 2022, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) released a list of Top 10 on CI/CD risks highlighting specific areas affecting software build and deployment infrastructure. This session focuses on how AWS services can be configured to mitigate the OWASP-identified risks.
SEC326: Strategies to address AWS Security Hub control findings at scale 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Priyank Ghedia, Megan O'Neil
Learn about strategies to address control findings at scale, leveraging built-in features of Security Hub like central configuration, automation rules, custom parameters, and other tools like AWS Firewall Manager and service control policies (SCPs). Gain actionable insights to reduce finding volume and improve your security score. Explore top failed Security Hub checks, review remediation options, and implement guardrails centrally at scale. Elevate your security posture and streamline compliance efforts with this comprehensive session.
SMB302: Empower your business with defense-in-depth architecture for gen AI 300 – Advanced
Builders' session - Henrique Trevisan, John Lee, Archana Ambavane, NS Sabah, Priyanka Sadhu
Generative AI promises transformative innovation, and as SMBs increasingly adopt generative AI applications, safeguarding these technologies with practical, cost-effective strategies is crucial. In this builders’ session, learn how to enhance your security posture by using defense in depth, and see an architecture with layered defenses across trust boundaries. Learn strategies to innovate while increasing resilience, build on the secure AWS infrastructure, and integrate AI/ML-specific security. Explore solutions like guardrails, observability, and responsible AI practices to ensure the safety and integrity of AI-powered solutions, harnessing generative AI while mitigating risks. You must bring your laptop to participate.
Operational Excellence
DOP311: Mastering automated, zero-downtime deployments 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - James Bland, Mirabela Dan
Unlock the power of seamless, risk-free deployments with this insightful chalk talk. Discover how to leverage AWS services like AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS AppConfig to automate safe, hands-off deployments to Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and AWS Lambda across multiple accounts and Regions at scale. Explore zero-downtime deployment strategies and learn best practices for reducing risk when deploying to AWS. Whether you’re a seasoned DevOps professional or just starting your cloud journey, this talk equips you with the tools and techniques to streamline your deployment processes, ensuring reliability and minimizing disruptions.
COP344: Best practices for observability 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Felix Mezo Gomez, Jon Steele
Achieving comprehensive observability by ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and user experience is crucial for businesses. In this interactive chalk talk, explore best practices for collecting and analyzing metrics, traces, and logs across your AWS environments. Discover techniques for streamlining agent management, optimizing alerting, and enabling cross-account observability. Learn how to reduce operational overhead while gaining deeper visibility into your applications' performance and health—all in a cost-optimized manner.
DOP310: Applying Amazon’s DevOps culture to your team 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Ben Shumpert, Leo Zhadanovsky
In this chalk talk, learn how Amazon helps its developers rapidly release and iterate software while maintaining industry-leading standards on security, reliability, and performance. Learn about the culture of two-pizza teams and how to maintain a culture of DevOps in a large enterprise. Also, discover how to help build such a culture at your own organization.
COP338: Architecting AWS accounts for scale 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Alpna Daniels, bradie Loeffel, Mariia Berezina
This chalk talk focuses on best practices for managing accounts, including account configuration, domain control, and establishing security boundaries via AWS accounts, AWS Organizations, and AWS Control Tower. Manage your business applications and data more easily and achieve operational excellence, security, and reliability while optimizing your costs.
SEC319: How to maintain and automate compliance on AWS 300 – Advanced
Breakout session - Cristina Rios Iribarren, Laura Verghote
Learn how AWS services can help simplify and automate compliance with various regulations and standards. This session starts by defining compliance and discussing the benefits of automation. Then, learn how to automate the collection of compliance data using AWS Artifact and AWS Audit Manager and how to create automated security and compliance checks with AWS Config and AWS Security Hub. Finally, learn how set up automated remediation workflows using AWS Systems Manager Automation documents. By the end of the session, cloud security engineers and cloud architects will know how to establish a comprehensive, automated compliance workflow on AWS.
DAT416: Design scalable database solutions with Aurora Limitless Database 400 – Expert
Chalk talk - David Wein, Aditya Samant
With Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, you get the flexibility and familiarity of a relational database with the virtually limitless horizontal scale of a distributed database. In this chalk talk, learn how to architect a hyperscale solution featuring a managed sharded database. Dive deep into Aurora Limitless Database, and learn how to make design decisions such as picking the right shard key, choosing collocated and reference tables, and more. Hear directly from the experts in the field as they share lessons learned, best practices, and anti-patterns along the way to help you achieve virtually limitless scale.
COP404: Best practices for generative AI observability 400 – Expert
Breakout session - Denis Batalov, Greg Eppel
As generative AI adoption grows, comprehensive observability is crucial for ensuring reliability, transparency, and optimization. In this session, learn about the observability challenges of different generative AI patterns, including large language models, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, and other emerging approaches. Discover how to use Amazon CloudWatch with a wide range of metrics, logs, and distributed tracing to gain visibility into the lifecycle of generative AI workloads. Additionally, explore the role of LangChain, a powerful framework for building generative AI applications, and how it can be leveraged in conjunction with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker to enhance observability across the development and deployment pipeline.
Cost Optimisation
COP403: Advanced analytics with AWS Cost and Usage Reports 400 – Expert
Code talk - Justin Marks, Steph Gooch
In this code talk, dive deep into AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) and learn how to write queries, analyze usage, derive insights, and connect other datasets. Learn the different data export options, including Legacy CUR, CUR 2.0, and FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) 1.0. Whether you're a FinOps practitioner, an experienced AWS user, or a DevOps engineer, this talk equips you with knowledge and techniques to harness the full potential of your AWS cost and usage data. Join us to take your cloud cost management to the next level!
COP410: Advanced cost allocation for AWS containerized workloads 400 – Expert
Workshop - Chris Strzelczyk, Nataliya Godunok
Due to the dynamic nature of cloud workloads and the inherent use of shared services, organizations are looking for simple ways to analyze spend and allocate their shared costs to teams and applications that utilize them. In this hands-on workshop, learn about the tools and techniques that can help you build your cost allocation strategy. Discover best practices for tagging and analyzing spend, and find out how to improve the cost visibility of your containerized Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS workloads with the split cost allocation data feature. Also, learn how to visualize your detailed cost and usage data with Amazon QuickSight dashboards. You must bring your laptop to participate.
COP354: Estimating your AWS costs using AWS Pricing Calculator 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Jeremiah Myers, Meredith Holborn
Before migrating or building workloads on AWS, you want to quickly evaluate options and estimate the cost. In this chalk talk, learn how you can use the AWS Pricing Calculator as part of your permit to operate and better forecast costs.
Sustainability
SUS307: Optimizing generative AI workloads for sustainability 300 – Advanced
Lightning talk - Raman Pujani
With the increasing complexity, scale, and adoption of AI workloads, it is important to consider their environmental impact. This lightning talk provides environmental sustainability insights that are specific to large language models. Explore practical best practices for different customization scenarios, including training models from the beginning, fine-tuning with additional data using full or parameter-efficient techniques, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and prompt engineering.
CMP308: Improve sustainability and reduce costs with AWS Graviton 300 – Advanced
Workshop - Marcin Bednarz, Chad Schmutzer
Are you looking to improve your price performance and reduce your environmental impact? AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances are a great fit for organizations of all sizes looking to maximize price performance and improve sustainability. In this hands-on workshop, learn how to modernize your workloads and reduce your carbon footprint by taking advantage of Graviton-based instances. Deep dive into AWS Graviton managed services, common use cases, and best practices. You must bring your laptop to participate.
Reliability
PEX310: Always on, always available with AWS resilience lifecycle framework 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Diego Dalmolin, Rishi Singla
Customers expect an always-on, always-available experience. In this chalk talk, explore strategies to minimize downtime and enable customer-facing applications to withstand unexpected failures or to quickly recover from them. Discover practical guidance on using the resilience lifecycle framework to build resilient applications on AWS. Learn actionable techniques to architect robust, fault-tolerant applications that deliver exceptional reliability for your customers. This chalk talk is intended for AWS Partners.
ARC401: Advanced cross-Region DR patterns on AWS 400 – Expert
Workshop - Simon Gebreselassie, Shivani Sharma
Join this hands-on workshop to explore a resilient, cloud-native architecture that surpasses the stringent availability and recovery regulations for financial markets utility providers. This highly available design uses Amazon ECS, Java Spring Boot, Amazon MQ, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Application Recovery Controller, and AWS Systems Manager. Delve into key design decisions, including cross-Region data stores, messaging, and cross-Region state replication. Also learn about exactly-once transaction processing, reliable global traffic shifting, and best practices for fail-safe disaster recovery orchestration. You must bring your laptop to participate.
COP308: Building resilient architectures with observability 300 – Advanced
Workshop - Matheus Canela Olivas Faraco, Abhaya Chauhan
As cloud-based applications become increasingly complex and dynamic, ensuring resilience and reliability is a critical concern for organizations. In this workshop, explore how to use AWS services, including AWS Resilience Hub, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Fault Injection Service, to build resilient and reliable cloud-based applications. Learn how to implement observability strategies that enable proactive monitoring, rapid incident response, and continuous improvement. You must bring your laptop to participate.
COP357: Resilient cloud, rapid response: Incident management on AWS 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Praveen Bhat, Narayanan (Nana) Lakshmanan
This chalk talk helps attendees learn incident management on AWS by leveraging key services such as AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Incident Manager and Automation. Attendees learn how to utilize Incident Manager to streamline the entire incident response lifecycle, from rapid detection to automated remediation. Additionally, the session addresses security benefits including enhanced operational security and auditing through Amazon CloudWatch logs. Learn how to use automation to simplify resiliency operations. Through live demos and best practices, attendees gain the knowledge and tools necessary to establish a robust, scalable, and security-focused incident response approach for their AWS-powered cloud operations.
Performance Efficiency
CMP411: Everything you've wanted to know about performance on EC2 instances 400 – Expert
Chalk talk - Arthur Petitpierre, Sinem Gulbay
Getting the best compute performance is a bit of an art, and knowing about low level details can help a lot. This chalk talk covers all the details you've always wanted to know about, such as memory topology, how to get access to hardware counters, how to take into account the side-effects of hyperthreading, and how to properly run performance tests and optimize your latency.
SVS312: AWS Lambda performance tuning: Best practices and guidance 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Matt Diamond, Vamsi Vikash Ankam
In this chalk talk, you learn about opportunities to optimize your serverless applications built with AWS Lambda, including optimizations in the function configuration and within your function code. This talk also covers how you can best measure and tune your function’s performance by configuring memory to get the right application performance. You also hear best practices for initialization logic and reuse to enable fast startup and fast function processing times.
STG340: Optimize performance and cost for archival data in Amazon S3 300 – Advanced
Chalk talk - Diana Yeung
Amazon S3 storage classes deliver the best price-performance object storage and are uniquely architected to deliver industry-leading functionality. In this chalk talk, learn how to analyze data access frequencies with native S3 tools, optimize archival storage using the S3 Glacier storage classes, and automate storage cost savings with S3 Lifecycle policies and S3 Intelligent-Tiering. Also explore how to get the best price-performance and integrate data restore processes into applications when designing and implementing archival restore workflows for data in the S3 Glacier storage classes, including through the use of S3 Batch Operations to make restores even faster and S3 Event Notifications to increase process efficiency.
ANT341: Optimize performance with observability, security, and log analytics 300 – Advanced
Breakout session - Muhammad Ali, Pavani Baddepudi
In today’s data-driven world, effective monitoring and log analytics are crucial for managing performance, ensuring reliability, and resolving issues efficiently. Join this session to discover how Amazon OpenSearch Service optimizes application performance and enhances reliability with advanced observability capabilities, including distributed tracing, real-time metrics collection, and customizable dashboards. Learn how to use OpenSearch Service security features such as fine-grained access control, encryption, and audit logging to protect your data and ensure compliance. Gain practical insights into optimizing performance, securing your data infrastructure, and efficiently managing your OpenSearch Service cluster to ensure your applications run smoothly and efficiently.
Rounding up
I hope this curated list of sessions goes some way to helping you build your own schedule for re:Invent. Do you think I’ve missed some key sessions off here? Let me know!