One more year I had the opportunity to attend the AWS Summit hosted in Madrid. As last year it was a good opportunity to catch up with AWS world and to see old friends and coworkers. I would like to share with you my insight of the conference and give you some details about the sessions I attended.

The good

• Amazon rented a whole pavillion this time in Madrid IFEMA so the whole place was huge.
• I loved what they did with the main scenario, instead of having the sessions on different place they just divided the circular scenarios in 6 parts so each part hosted a session. When you entered the place they gave you some headphones so you can listen to the session speakers.
• The AWS Deep Racer activity was one of the most fun activities. It basically consist on a competition where developers develop their little robots using Machine Learning so the robots complete a course as quick as possible.
• It was good to see old friends and coworkers from the SAP world. These conferences are amazing for networking.
• Going inside the conference was super smooth. The registration took like 2 minutes and there was no queues at all.
• The sessions were really good (almost all of them). The technical knowledge of the speakers was incredible and the customer’s point of view really helpful.

The bad

• I already said this on my review of the AWS Summit Madrid 2018 and I’m afraid this will happen year after year. Usually in this kind of events the companies that have a stand give merchandising for free. The only thing you have to know is hear a small talk about the company and its products. It is incredible the amount of people that only care about the merchandising. People asking for a stick with incredible rude manners when they know about the small talk they had to listen for getting it.
• The speakers during the keynote were not the best ones. I don’t like listening to a CIO who have zero technical idea talking about technical stuff. It doesn’t make sense, I do appreciate that they share their experience but coming from the technical world I just think that a big part of their conference was bullshit.
• SAP was not that present during the sessions. Last year there were a high amount of sessions related to SAP like migrating SAP to AWS, managing SAP systems in AWS, etc. This year I only saw one or two sessions related to SAP…
• Again, food was a huge problem. AWS provided breakfast, lunch, cocktail at the end and small brake during the morning. The small brake didn’t happen, no coffee, water or food at 12:00 so I had to go for lunch since I was starving. I missed the first session because of the huge lines in the restaurant area.
• One of the sessions I attended was done by an American talking in Spanish. I really appreciate when people speaks in Spanish but it is really boring just to read a PowerPoint presentation. I think the language of the sessions should be as the speaker prefers.

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The ugly

• Again, the keynote was too long. I already said it but Spanish people loose their focus after a couple of hours listening to someone speaking in English.
• Too many people for the size of the place. Once the key note finished the place was super crowded.
• Customers talking about their experience should be based on reality. I’m just telling this because one of our last customers attend as speaker so they can explain their migration to AWS. I know from first hand that the whole process was not as smooth as they said…

†The sessions

I’m sorry since the sessions name are in Spanish. I tried to find them in English but it was impossible:

• Migrando aplicaciones críticas para el negocio a AWS (SAP/ORCL/MSFT): Session oriented to migrating critical applications to AWS with a strong focus on SAP. In fact it was the only session related to SAP that I could find. I really liked it, specially the customer testimony about how they migrated their critical infrastructure to AWS.
• Prepárate para la nube con las rutas de aprendizaje de AWS: The sessions was done in Spanish but unfortunately the speaker just read the PowerPoint presentation. I ended up leaving the session…
• Bases de datos relacionales escalables con Amazon Aurora: Holy molly! I was super impressed with Amazon Aurora as database. Also the speaker was incredible. I just wish Amazon Aurora were compatible with SAP applications 😉
• Arquitecturas Híbridas con VMWare Cloud y AWS Outpost: Really interesting session about hybrid architectures using both AWS and VMware. They did a live demo moving a VM from a data center in Boston to AWS Region in Frankfurt. Unfortunately the demo ended up on a bad way since the VM was lost in Space and Time.
• Mejores prácticas para optimizar costes de cómputo: I loved the customer experience during this session. They basically explained how to reduce your AWS bill and how they booked their instances based on their experience. I didn’t know that if you reserve your instances with the convertible options you can convert the instance to the smallest available and then to the new type in order to save money.

Tips for next year

This time I have no tips for next year. It was probably my last AWS Summit in Madrid and hopefully I will attend to a different AWS Summit somewhere else. Changes are coming!