Today is the first day offical day of AWS re:Invent 2017 and things are kicking off with the global partner summit. Today also is my first day of AWS re:Invent and I am looking forward to experiencing a different type of big IT conference with all previous experiences being at VMworld or the old Microsoft Tech Eds. Just buy looking at the agenda, schedule and content catalog I can already tell re:Invent is a very very different type of IT conference.

As you may or may not know I started this blog as Hosting is Life! and the first half of my career was spent around hosting applications and web services…in that I gravitated towards looking at AWS solutions to help compliment the hosting platforms I looked after and I was actively using a few AWS services in 2011 and 2012 and attended a couple of AWS courses. After joining Zettagrid my use of AWS decreased and it wasn’t until Veeam announced supportability for AWS storage as part of our v10 announcements that I decided to get back into the swing of things.

Subsequently we announced Veeam Availability for AWS which leverages EBS snapshots to perform agentless backups of AWS instances and more recently we where announced as a launch partner for VMware Cloud on AWS data availability solutions. For me, the fact that VMware have jumped into bed with AWS has obviously raised AWS’s profile in the VMware community and it’s certainly being seen as the cool thing to know (or claim to know) within the ecosystem.

Veeam isn’t the only backup vendor looking to leverage what AWS has to offer by way of extending availability into the hyper-scale cloud and every leading vendor is rushing to claim features that offload backups to AWS cloud storage as well as offering services to protect native AWS workloads…as with IT Pros this is also the in thing!

Apart from backup and availability, my sessions are focused on storage, compute, scalability and scale as well as some sessions on home automation with Alexa and alike. This years re:Invent is 100% a learning experience and I am looking forward to attending a lot of sessions and taking a lot of notes. I might even come out taking the whole serverless thing a little more seriously!

Moving away from the tech the AWS world is one that I am currently removed from…unlike the VMware ecosystem and VMworld I wouldn’t know 95% of the people delivering sessions and I certainly don’t know much about the AWS community. While I can’t fix that by just being here this week, I can certainly use this week as a launching pad to get myself more entrenched with the technology, the ecosystem and the community.

Looking forward to the week and please reach out if you are around.