Introduction
AWS Summit Toronto 2024 was on Wednesday September 11, 2024. It was a full day of presentations and discussions, mainly focused around Generative AI, but there were lots of other talks on other technologies relating to it. If you haven’t attended an AWS Summit before, I would recommend checking out my previous articles on the subject.
Check-In
I got to the convention centre around 9AM, and the lineup was starting to get long. Having your email with the QR code, as well as your government issued photo ID ready can speed things along. There was also early check-in the day before if you were able to go, which came with the incentive of $25 of AWS credits, or another swag item.
In the Check-In area, there was a nice collection of pins for inclusion, allowing you to add a pin to your lanyard for your pronouns, identify as an ally for inclusion, or neurodiversity.
The Sessions
There was a full lineup of sessions, and although I arrived fairly early, by the time I had my badge and had gotten into the panel area, the 9AM sessions were already full. I had planned on attending KUB401 – Enhance developer efficiency and experience with platform engineering, but the room was already at capacity. This was a fairly common refrain the rest of the day – if you didn’t show up 15-20 minutes early to line up, the session would fill up quickly. I suppose this is a good thing, indicating the popularity and attendance at the Summit.
I didn’t attend the keynote directly, but instead went to the self-paced labs, so I could try out some of the sandbox exercises. They were streaming the keynote in the lab, so I was able to multitask a bit. Most of the tutorials were from AWS Skillbuilder. I found a few out of date – some still referenced CodeCatalyst or used Cloud9; or in the case of the WordPress Static S3 site tutorial, referenced code that was no longer available. I mentioned this to the lab helpers, and submitted some feedback.
In the afternoon, I attended a session on Karpenter, which is a more advanced way of handling scaling in Kubernetes. We went over some of the basics, and then covered some scenarios where EKS can be set up to provide GPU enabled nodes for LLM workloads. We discussed JARK on EKS (Jupyter, Argo, RAY, and Kubernetes), which is a stack designed to streamline deployment and management of Generative AI models on Amazon EKS.
Ray was a very interesting framework for scaling workloads for inference and training, and has multiple components within the Kubernetes cluster. This article goes through some of the components.
I tried to get into a few other sesions, but despite showing up 15 minutes early, the ones I wanted to get into were full up. I’m hoping that some of them will have recordings or slides available, but I didn’t see any setups for this in most of the rooms.
The Food
In previous years there was a light breakfast, but this year there was only coffee/tea available in the Expo area in the morning. There was a separate paid concession area on the 700 level if you wanted something a bit more. There was mainly Starbucks coffee, and a decent selection of tea. As a habit, I usually bring a travel mug with me so I can refill and keep a hot drink with me throughout the day without worrying about spilling.
For lunch there was a healty selection of bowls – a Chicken/Noodle bowl with lots of veggies, and a Mediterranean Vegetable Bowl. There were cold Pepsi drinks on available, and it looks like they planned enough food as I didn’t hear any announcements about running out quickly. The food was filling and tasty – the chicken was braised nicely with a soy dressing, the noodles had a good bite, and the veggies were fresh and crunchy.
There was coffee and tea throughout the day in the Expo area, and there was a networking mixer set up around 5PM with beer and wine. Considering the AWS Summit is a free conference, this was quite nice.
The Expo
The Expo was my favorite area, as there were a lot of different booths with vendors, and it was the best place to randomly meet up with connections. Almost as soon as I arrived, I ran into friends and had some good chats. I checked out a couple of booths, the AWS AI Hub, and the AWS Deepracer area. It was consistently busy throughout the day, and worth going around to check everything out.
I helped out at the AWS Community Lounge desk for a couple of hours in the afternoon, answering questions, and directing attendees to resources. We had QR codes on the back of stickers, so it made it easy to give directions to things like the AWS User Groups, AWS Cloud Clubs for Students, AWS Programs for Research and Education (Cloud Credits/Grants); and of course, the AWS Community Builders Program, which I am proud to be part of. I was fortunate to meet up and chat with a number of other Community Builders and AWS Heroes. Behind the desk was the Dev Chat area, where a number of community members had presented Dev Chats throughout the day.
The Swag
I didn’t spend a ton of time going around trying to collect swag, but there was definitely an opportunity for a lot of it, if you needed to refresh your T-Shirt wardrobe, or needed new socks. There was a “Passport” where you could visit a couple of booths and get stamps, and turn it in for some swag.
There was also an AWS booth where you could fill out some Gartner surveys on AWS products, and pick up a T-Shirt, sweater, or other item. They ran out of sizes and sweaters fairly quickly, and there was a pretty long line to redeem. My main issue here is that the QR codes were not easy to find – they were on the other side before the line-up, or at the redemption desk, and the signs didn’t have any of the codes. There was a bit of an overflow coming off the line, so we got directed to the side to finish surveys.
The After Parties
After the official networking mixer, a number of companies had organized “Happy Hour” or “After Party” events. There was an AWS Community Mixer at Kelly’s Landing, so I felt obliged to check that out first. I had a lot of good chats with other AWS community members, as well as some AWS employees. We had quite a large amount of tasty food, and free drinks as well. The above photo is a Pineapple Ninja Wheat Ale from Musoka, in a cool Tiki beer glass. I really enjoyed it.
A few of us wandered down to the Steam Whistle brewery to check out the Hashicorp/SpectroCloud event, but they were just winding down and heading out. We went over to the CN Tower event that was still going on, but they were at capacity. Eventually I had to go to catch my GO Train home.
Conclusion
The most important part of the AWS Summit for me is the people. I really enjoy meeting new people, and chatting with connections and friends. I had a great time this year, and while I didn’t get to check out everything I would have wanted, I wouldn’t have changed anything. If you have the opportunity to attend an AWS Summit, I would definitely recommend it, and register early!
Resources
Gallery
