This week, I consider myself lucky I’m working with AWS at customer and at dbi since few years now and I consider myself lucky to attend the conference in person.

At re:Invent, there are different types of content so you can adapt your schedule. I personally tried this year to get some diversity, I started the week with a workshop on EKS. As we can imagine, workshop sessions are really the kind of place where the computer is needed because the objective is to practice yourself with people from the product team to ask questions. There were some technical issues with the Wifi to start but the new platform providing a full AWS account for practising is really nice, there is no need to prepare something in our own account so it’s faster to get to the point. The workshop is also available to run in your own account, if you’re interested you can visit https://www.eksworkshop.com/

There is another type of session with practical experience I tried for the 1st time yesterday: Builders’ session. Here we were split on different tables with no more than 10 people each table having its own speaker. I have able to run a scenario about compliance using AWS Config with a custom rule and remediation. It was nice to have someone available to raise a question when the resources were not shown as expected in the rule. In the end it was a human mistake from my side in Python code 🙂

The breakout sessions are more common with a speaker showing his presentation. If I have to take one from yesterday, it would be the session from Brian Terry “How to reuse patterns when developing infrastructure as code”. A friend told me once that a teacher said when developing you should be lazy. It may seem a surprising point but the idea behind is that you should not reinvent the wheel for every project. If you already have code doing what you need to do, reuse it.

I’m more a terraform enthusiast and not using a lot CloudFormation. But in this session with demos I’ve learned that it’s quite easy to build modules. And then reuse the modules in other CloudFormation templates or even going deeper and reuse the modules in CDK. I’ll have another look at that feature for sure.

Let’s see what I’ll be able to learn and share for tomorrow.