Report from AWS Heroes Summit 2024

I spent all of last week (July 15-19) in Seattle at Amazon's headquarters for a top-secret event exclusively for AWS Heroes.

How was the AWS Heroes Summit?

In short: fantastic.

Those who know me well know that I don't throw praise around lightly. 😉

Our conference days were packed with many long sessions (an hour and a half to two hours) across 4 tracks. This allowed everyone to choose something interesting for themselves. The sessions featured well-known figures like Developer Advocates who often speak at conferences, but also engineers building services and the managers responsible for them. With all due respect to the DAs, the sessions with the latter two groups were the most interesting. I wasn't familiar with most of these people before.

The engineers from AWS made an incredible impression on me; some of them are absolute rockstars and top-tier experts. Top of the top!

I'm not even sure how to best describe this impression 🤔 I imagine they're specialists of the same caliber as those working for Elon, and when he tells them to accomplish seemingly impossible things, they make it happen regardless of the scale of the problem. And AWS has the same kind of people working for them!

In summary, our favorite serverless services are in good hands. During these long sessions, there was plenty of room for discussions and questions. Interestingly, this worked both ways. The engineers from AWS were very interested in our problems, use cases, and generally what we think. Customer obsession in a new form.

Serverless is not dead!

In recent weeks (before the Summit in Seattle), several blog posts appeared once again proclaiming the death of or disappointment with serverless. This topic was amplified by the ubiquitous GenAI, which media-wise overshadows all other news and changes in AWS, as was particularly evident at the New York Summit, giving the impression that AWS has stopped investing in anything other than artificial intelligence. Luc van Donkersgoed, a Serverless Hero, critically described and summarized this situation in his article.

In a way, I feel obligated to address these opinions and the prevailing anti-serverless climate, as well as the accusations against AWS.

Judging by the AWS Heroes Summit agenda alone, there's no cause for concern. Roughly half of all sessions were about serverless, while the rest covered several topics: GenAI, security, databases, and containers (in no particular order).

Meetings and conversations with service teams show that AWS is developing normally, in many directions. Of course, GenAI, due to its nature, will touch many areas. Perhaps teams are encouraged to consider integrating such solutions into their services, but it's certainly not the case that AWS is investing only in artificial intelligence. The vast majority of new features and issues discussed in the sessions I attended had nothing to do with GenAI.

What's coming next?

Serverless is doing well, as I mentioned, rockstars are working on the services and will deliver many interesting and necessary new features in Step Functions, EventBridge, Lambda, and probably other serverless services, before and at re:Invent, and in the coming year.

The entire event and all content are subject to NDA. Therefore, I can't reveal anything specific.

I really liked several upcoming updates and can't wait for them to appear so I can use them myself. And I'm talking about fairly ordinary engineering updates to the aforementioned services. No GenAI magic here ✨😃
Some new features can definitely be classified in the "how long can we wait for this?" category 😉
The remaining things are less exciting for me, solely because I don't have clients/projects where I could apply them 🙁 Which by no means diminishes their importance. They're created to facilitate building or increase the security of solutions.

To be fair and not just paint a rosy picture, there was one thing in the [secret] service that I asked about and received an honest answer that they're aware of the need, but won't do it until 2025 because [secret]. That's a shame.

The level of openness of AWS employees towards Heroes elevated this Summit to levels previously unimaginable to me. Access to information covered by NDAs allowed for free communication both ways. This kind of relationship with service teams is the greatest value of being an AWS Hero.

Now I just need to find interesting projects where I can use this newly acquired knowledge 😉

The Summit is not just lectures

The AWS Heroes Summit was attended by 178 Heroes from 46 countries. As of July 2024, there are 260 Heroes worldwide in total across 56 countries. Never before in the ten-year history of this program have so many of us been in one place.

I'm the one in the Lambda / Half-life t-shirt 😃

In the first row in the middle stands Jeff Barr. He opened this mini-conference with an interesting keynote on the history and future of AWS.

Speaking of celebrities, the big surprise on the second day was a visit from Matt Garman, the new CEO of AWS. Interestingly, he didn't come to his keynote to dazzle us with a marketing presentation 🙂, but greeted us, said a few words, and then announced he would start answering questions from the audience.

Respect!

Heroes quickly grabbed the microphones, and Matt answered all questions, including the uncomfortable ones. As a person with a huge technical background, it was easy for him to win over our tech crowd.

Celebrating together

The Summit is a great opportunity for networking, as it doesn't have the crazy pace of re:Invent and is much more intimate. Every day we spent time together from breakfast until evening. I had the opportunity to deepen relationships with people I already knew and make new friends.

On the second day, during the afternoon networking session, we celebrated a special occasion – the tenth birthday of the AWS Hero program and the 10th anniversary of AWS Lambda. These beautiful cakes were prepared for us to mark the occasion. 🍰

The Polish 🇵🇱 representation at the Summit was very strong. Looking from the top left: Daniel Aniszkiewicz, Paweł Zubkiewicz, Łukasz Dorosz, Tomek Ptak, Karolina Boboli, Jarek Zieliński, Rafał Mituła, Tomek Dudek, Dominik Grzywaczewski, and Maciek Lelusz.