I went to the AWS re:Invent conference again this Las Vegas. This was the 3rd or 4th time that I have been and this one was excellent. The management of the attendees seems a bit better this year than it was in 2017.

My focus this year was in serverless, Lambda and Fargate, and machine learning related topics. I stayed in the Aria hotel and made it to 21 sessions during the week. I did not go to the any of the evening activities both because the 3 hour time difference would make it exhausting and because I am there to learn. The evening activities would just waste time for me and tire me out.

The sessions on Step Functions and securing serverless applications were very informative.

The DeepRacer car announcement interested me because it seems like a practical application for machine learning so I ordered a car as soon as I could.

I am looking forward to trying a few of the exercises using the simulator.

The announcement for the AWS Ground Station (control and process data from a satellite) particularly interested me. In the past interacting with a satellite required a significant investment in the ground station for it. With this announcement AWS is going to make that portion of the system profoundly easier and cheaper particularly for situations where you only need it for a define amount of time. The continuing proliferation of satellites is going to provide an opportunity for innovative applications to process the data from them. I really wish that there was a public satellite that could be used to receive the data stream from and experiment with image processing in that area.

More to come on this.