2017 AWS reInvent reView

Amazon’s annual AWS conference was held in Las Vegas from Monday, Nov 27 to Friday, Dec 1. There were 43,000 attendees spread up and down the Las Vegas strip. At first, I wasn’t sure that it was time well-spent, but after making some scheduling adjustments, I had a great time.

Getting There

This conference is held right after Thanksgiving so this is absolutely the busiest time of the year to fly. Since the Sunday after Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year, I recommend that you fly out before Sunday or on Monday. Since the conference officially starts on Monday and I didn’t want to risk missing some sessions, I flew out on Saturday. This gave me time to acclimate, find my way around, rest and, well, this is Las Vegas, so go enjoy yourself.

Staying There

By looking at the schedule, there seemed to be two major hotel areas, the Venetian/Palazzo and the Aria. Most of the nightly events centered near the V/P so I picked the Venetian. This was mostly a good choice, but I will discuss logistics later. There are also plenty of hotels near the V/P complex - check out a map. Regardless, be prepared to walk, walk, walk. I travelled an average of 20K steps each day (Yeah, Apple Watch....).

Travel Between Hotels (Bussing from Hell)

Prior to the conference, I changed my schedule so that I would only be at one location each day rather than traversing back and forth on the same day (eg, Day One at the Aria, Day Two at Venetian, etc). This seemed like a good plan until I took the bus to the Aria on the first day. Whereas the Venetian Conf Center was somewhat spread out, the Aria halls and sessions were packed tight. And the bus travel back and forth was horrible. Then, and this is the kicker, I learned that if you didn’t have a reserved session, your chance of getting into a walk-up session on Day One or Two (more on this later) was slim to none. So after a partial Day One, I gave up on going to the Aria. I redid my schedule to stay around the Venetian. Based on the rest of the conference, this turned out to be a good plan.

Bottomline - the buses sucked badly. There needs to be solution where buses are not involved. This just doesn’t’ work.

One add’l thing - all of these hotels and conference complexes are huge so getting there a day early to get your bearings is advised. But if you get lost, no worries, AWS had like a million people set up in strategic locations giving directions. They were awesome!

Sessions

I went to and/or remembered the following sessions. I know that I went to more sessions, but didn’t take notes or just burned out. I’d like to give credit to the speakers, but things were just too fast and furious.

• Optimizing Serverless Application Data Tiers/DynamoDB
• Best Practices for Building Serverless Big Data Apps
• Using AWS to Process DNA Sequence Reads
• Progressive Web Apps and AWS Mobile Hub
• Mobile App Dev State of the Union
• Developing Apps on AWS in the JVM
• Docker on AWS
• CEO Keynote (WATCH THIS)
• Storage State of the Union
• Deep Dive on Amazon Rekogntion
• Introducing Amazon Translate
• Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances
• CTO Keynote (WATCH THIS)
• AWS Database State of the Union
• EC2 Foundations
• New - Deep dive on Amazon Neptune
• Serverless Architectural Patterns and Best Practices

I have a several pages of Apple Pencil notes taken in GoodNotes - I’m sure that they aren’t legible for publishing.

Myself and a Co-worker

These are other sessions that I would recommend or want to watch when/if they are available on YouTube. Some sounded good, but I couldn’t get in or had a conflict.

• Thirty Serverless Architectures in 30 Minutes
• Serverless Reactive Microservices on AWS
• Designing Microservices with Serverless
• Deep Dive on Amazon EC2 Instances
• Getting Started with Serverless Architectures
• Getting from Here to There: A Journey from On-premise to Serverless Architecture
• AWS Compute: Whats’ New in EC2, Containers and Serverless
• How DynamoDB Powered Amazon Prime Day 2017
• DynamoDB: What’s New
• Deep Dive on AWS CloudFormation
• AWS CLI: 2017 and Beyond
• What’s New in Serverless
• Getting Started with Serverless Computing Using AWS Lambda
• Big Data Architectural Patterns and Best Practices
• Best Practices for Building Serverless Big Data Apps

Walk-Up vs Reserved Sessions

About a month before the conference, you are allowed to try to reserve a seat for each of your sessions. This process is very competitive - akin to ordering the most popular iPhone at 3am. Amazon holds a high percentage of each session for reserved seats and rest are for walk-up. If you only have a walk-up spot, you are dog-meat, the lowest of the low. Unless you skip the entire session before your walk-up session just to wait in line, you won’t get in. At least that was true on the first 2 days or so of the conference. So if this happens, be prepared to stand ALOT. So try to get as many reserved sessions as possible.

Mid-week as Amazon begins to announce new technologies and/or releases existing tech, new sessions magically appear. Use the Mobile App to watch for these sessions. These additions also have the effect of opening up other existing sessions as attendees jump from an current reserved session to a new session (you can only hold a reserved seat for a single time period). So my ability to get reserved sessions on Day Three and Day Four were much easier than prior days.

After Hours

There was one or more activities just about every night of the conference. The Happy Hour hosted in the exhibit hall was great - didn’t seem as crowded as it could have been. The Pub Crawl on another night was super crowded and we opted out to get a nice dinner away from the Conference Crazy. The main party on Day Four evening was huge with a lot of food, alcohol and DJ Snake. I guess that he is a thing. Not my thing, but a lot of people enjoyed it.

DJ Snake

Tricks/Tips for Attending and Advice for Amazon

Stay on Friday Morning

I flew out on early on Friday morning just to get back home and a non-Vegas civilization. However, there were several good, repeat and new sessions on Friday morning and many of these had plenty of reserved seats.

Advice: Stay through to Friday noonish

One location for all sessions - no buses

Amazon - figure out a location where buses are not needed. Or super-improve the bus schedule so that arrivals aren’t held up by hotel delivery trucks (causing 40 minute delays).

Advice: Try to schedule all your sessions in one location.

Figure out how to handle large sessions better

I don’t have a solution here, but the sessions were just too crowded and it was a competition to get into nearly every session. You are smart - figure out a better way.

Take care of the people in line

Lines are likely unavoidable for this conference in the future. So Amazon, take care of the people in long lines. Bring them water, snacks and gifts/swag.

Advice: Carry water and snacks. Pretend that you are going to Disney World at the busiest time of the year. Skip the sunscreen, though.

Don’t Go

If you are the type of person that can gather what you need from a technology via video recorded session, stay home and watch - many, if not all of the conference sessions, are professionally edited and published on YouTube. But the question is will you watch them and discuss with your organization.

Go

Even if you are freaked out about crowds and packed sessions, I really started to get something out of this conference on Days Three and Four. It was a combination of the sessions that I switched to plus just spending time with my co-workers, both bonding over the AWS Cloud Tech that we are using and just discussions about work and life.

I’d like to conclude with what the general theme of the conference, but I couldn’t pick out just one or two or three. Amazon/AWS is doing so much - it’s hard to fathom. They have advanced on every core building blocks of AWS while announcing many, more new technologies in Big Data, Machine Learning, iOT, etc. They have an appetite for every new tech and with the core building blocks established over the past several years, they seemingly can do anything with proper funding and direction.

Except scheduling buses and moving 43,000 people to hourly sessions.

Maybe drones for next year?

Follow up: 2016 Stock Market, Indices and Index Investing

Thanks to everyone for the the great feedback on my 2016 Stock Market post.   I considered editing the original blog, but the feedback gives me an excuse for another post.

The best feedback asked for a clarification of the main points of my post.  Let me order up some thoughts:

1. You have investments.  You have no idea on how they are performing relative to the rest of market.  How do you make a reasonable comparison?
2. Look at the general market indices as a start.  I listed 3 indices in my previous post.  Did your investments beat these indices?   Can you match your investments against what the indices track?
3. This comparison is just a start and could be inaccurate if your investments are in areas that the indices don't track.  Perhaps your investment is more conservative and less risky than the indices.  Also, ignore the Dow Jones.
4. Since I only listed 3 of 1000's of indices, dive further into comparing your investments against other indices like the FTSE All World TR USD index.   Check out how the Vanguard index funds have performed.
5. Do these comparisons on a regular basis.  The beginning of the year can be used to set your goals.  Ideally, you should look at your investments on a monthly basis.
6. Look at all the fees that your mutual funds charges.  Some mutual funds charge in excess of 1% total.  This is a drain on your investments when there may be equivalent or even better funds with a better (less) fee structure.
7. Look at Index Funds.
8. If you can't do this or this doesn't make sense, get help with your investments.

I left a number of URL references out of the original blog post.  Here goes:

• Quicken
• Mint
• Personal Capital
• Evernote
• Index Revolution by Charles D. Ellis

Thanks again for the feedback.  On the investment front, what other questions or topics should I consider for future blogs?

Photo by Ron, Espresso beans by Stumptown

2016 Stock Market, Indices and Index Investing

Each year, about this time, I assess where my investments have taken me.  Up, down, flat, happy, sad - it’s time to see what has happened.    I could use emoji’s here, but it’s still a little early in the blog.

I’ve read that the beginning of the year is a good time for resolutions, losing weight, going to the gym and overall planning.   I hope that you look at your investments a little more often than that.  Ideally, once per month - like around the 10th of the month when you can get access to monthly statements if you aren’t monitoring your investments with Quicken, Mint, Personal Capital or the garden variety of apps that download your financial history.  

Y'all do this, right?   RIGHT?

Back to the yearly investment checkpoint - the first thing that I want to track is how some of the market indices perform.   You can find these with some quick searches and likely there will be different interpretations that led to different values for the same index.   The big difference is whether the performance number uses reinvestment of dividends or not.   For my purposes, I only look at values with reinvested dividends because that’s why I normally do in my own investments.

To save you some time, here’s what I found for 2016:

• Dow Jones:   16.5%
• S&P 500:       12.3%
• Nasdaq:          7.5%

I put these numbers in a simple, single note in Evernote.   These are great to review over time.   But I do more that just note the indices, I keep an easy percentage on what my major investment accounts do as a whole.   Not individual funds or stocks - just what my 401k did, my SEP, my wife’s, etc.     What did my 401k do in 2009?   27%   (and I’m glad that I didn’t try to time market reentry after the 2008 crash!!!).   Emoji time:   😅

How do I use these numbers in my review?   Very loosely - these are only 3 measures among thousands.   But I have to start somewhere.  In the future, as I invest in more index funds, I want to track some other indices such as the FTSE All World TR USD, some bond indices and a mix of large, midsize and small cap indices.   

Another quick way to look at what the market has done is to check out many of the Vanguard Index Investments and ETFs.   Vanguard has a number of low-cost funds that track different indices.   It’s a good place to do one stop comparisons.

One note - it’s really DUMB to track the Dow Jones.  It’s only 30 stocks and the index is calculated on each stock’s price.   So stocks with a larger price/share get a larger weighting.   The Dow Jones was formulated when computers weren’t around so this formula was easy to maintain.   Today, we can be a lot smarter.   But the Dow stills gets a lot of press especially now as it hovers around 20,000.   So news (good or bad) moves the market.

Above, I mentioned that I would be investing in more index funds.  When I say ‘I’, I really mean ‘we’ and when I say ‘we’, I really mean my new investment advisory company.   Starting at the end of last year, I began to look around for a new company that could provide more retirement planning with all of our investment vehicles ‘holistically’ (gawd, I hate that word).  I felt like my last investment advisor was under-performing the market, but mostly, could not provide an overall managed plan (using both our pre-tax and post-tax investments).

To cut to the chase, we picked Abound Wealth which hails from great podcasts and just moved to the Nashville, TN area.   We are still in the honeymoon phase, but so far, we really like what they do.    http://www.aboundwealth.com

Abound doesn’t necessarily recommend all index funds at all, but they share one of my recent investment discoveries - fees matter.   They *really* matter.  While index funds may not be right for some situations, generally, the overall fees charges are MUCH less than a mutual fund.

If you don’t believe me or you need more convincing, I just finished reading The Index Revolution by Charles D. Ellis.  It’s a good book reviewing the mutual fund industry, how fees have gotten ridiculously out of hand and why index funds are a good choice for investing.

To recap:

• Review your investments now.   How did you do last year?
• What needs to change?     Do you need to save more money?    
• Do you need an investment plan?  
• Check out what Vanguard offers
• Stop talking about the Dow Jones
• Read The Index Revolution

Photo by Ron, Faces By Katy and Steve.