What Sessions I’m Attending at AWS re:Invent This Week

Richie and I are at the AWS re:Invent conference because:

• A good number of our customers run SQL Server on Amazon Web Services
• We use AWS ourselves (our first project, PasteThePlan, was built on AWS because we wanted to keep costs low)
• Clients and friends kept telling me how awesome the conference was
• We’re recruiting clients (this isn’t a marketing event for us at all – we’re just there to learn, and Richie jokes that it’ll be fun to walk around at a conference where Brent Ozar isn’t BRENT OZAR)
• Vegas, baby (and in March 2017, I’m attending Google Cloud Next in SF)

Here’s some of the sessions I’m attending, and why:

Serverless Data Pipelines, Event-Driven ETL, and Stream Processing (BDM303) – When files land in S3 (like when PasteThePlan saves execution plans), you can use Lambda to process them. Down the road, I’d love to email you with a list of prioritized suggestions for your plan. I’m also attending Building Complex Serverless Applications (GPST404), Real-Time Data Processing Using Lambda (SVR301), and What’s New with Lambda (SVR202).

Serverless Authentication and Authorization (MBL306) – How to use Cognito (AWS’s identity management system) in combination with Google and Facebook authorization. Right now, our subscribers are stored in a few different places (Mailchimp for the newsletter, WordPress for comments, another WordPress for their training courses, and not at all for PasteThePlan.) Centralizing that would help some of the things we want to do going forward.

Design, Deploy, and Optimize SQL Server on AWS (WIN306) – they’re trying to go deep and cover multiple HA/DR features, and I don’t think you can do both of those in a single session, but I’m curious. Also attending Turbocharge Your .NET Developments with AWS (DEV309).

Using Lambda to Build Control Systems for AWS Infrastructure (SVR401) – When CloudWatch fires off monitoring events, you can have Lambda code run to respond. I’m interested in this for SQL Server reasons. For example, if I know a SQL Server running in an EC2 VM is having a specific set of problems (say, sustained slow storage throughput due to undersized IO capacity), and it’s been happening for quite a while, I could make a judgment call about moving it to a higher-memory or higher-bandwidth instance type.

Getting Started with AWS Aurora (DAT203) – AWS’s RDS option that’s MySQL-compatible (but managed and much easier to scale). Ticketmaster’s data architect will explain how they use it. Also attending Aurora Best Practices (DAT301) where they’re covering 2bn row tables, and Aurora Deep Dive (DAT303) to see how they’re handling the storage layer.

I’m not giving up SQL Server, just keepin’ on expanding my horizons, learning new stuff.