AWS re:Invent 2019: Serverless Session Guide

John Kinmonth
IOpipe Blog
Published in
24 min readAug 23, 2019

--

5 tips for avoiding serverless FOMO at this year’s re:invent

You know those conferences where you can just show up late, grab your swag bag, and stroll into the nearest session that tickles your fancy?

AWS re:Invent definitely isn’t one of them.

With more than 3,000 sessions, planning your conference can be a monumental task. For developers and engineering leads focused on serverless, this year promises to be another big year.

Unfortunately, with reserving sessions at re:Invent, if you snooze, you lose (or at least need to wait in a long line for remaining seats).

But enough about FOMO. Let’s talk about JOMO (the joy of missing out, if that’s not obvious).

Here are five ways to help you embrace JOMO amidst the chaos at this year’s re:Invent.

1. Have goals

First off, you won’t be able to attend everything and talk with everyone.

It’s impossible. Instead, like any good project, start with your individual conference goals and work backward. Are you trying to solve a specific problem plaguing your infrastructure? Do you want to meet with a certain AWS Community Hero or former colleague? Are you tasked with bringing a new dev tooling recommendation back to your team? Are you just trying to have fun?

Without these types of guiding goals, the options are simply too overwhelming. If you have a solid framework to start from, you can joyfully “miss out” on sessions that don’t line up with your goals.

2. Don’t be available

Next, leave your work at home. Do not promise deliverables to your boss or colleagues, do not say that you’ll be available on email or Slack throughout the conference, and, for the love of all that is good, do not plan to take a turn on call.

This is a recipe for attending sessions all day and then working all night. Or worse, having to miss sessions and meetings that you really want to attend.

It’s tempting to soften “the ask” for attending a conference with some of the above caveats, but better to just embrace that it’s a week of learning and inspiration that will benefit your career, company, and team.

Plan your sprint accordingly.

3. Be aware of walking capacity and distances when booking sessions and meetings

My typical walking capacity is about 8–10 mpb (miles per burrito)

From end-to-end inside the Palazzo and Venitian, it’s nearly a half mile. And that’s just one of the conference sites.

Imagine weaving your way between gaming tables, sushi restaurants, and throngs of tourists multiple times per day between multiple sites. It can equal a lot of burritos if you plan poorly.

On the same note, be sure to wear comfortable shoes. Nothing is worse than getting blisters by the second day.

4. Remember ear plugs for the re:Play party

It gets loud at the re:Play party. Like, really loud.

If you’re sensitive to high decibels like me and still want to have fun at the party, make sure to bring ear plugs or just stop by the IOpipe booth to pick up your free pair and talk monitoring and observability for AWS Lambda.

5. Book early, and then relax
Book your sessions as early as possible, and know that you can almost always find the session on demand later. If you have any critical meetings with vendors or AWS solution architects, book those now, as well. It’s a great time to put in feature requests, try out new tools, and get inspired away from your daily list of outstanding issues.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled an early list of all serverless-related sessions segmented by level and listed alphabetically by title. Although reserved seating isn’t available yet, be sure to log in to the session catalog and “star” each session you’re interested in.

In addition, if you’d like to schedule an IOpipe serverless observability demo for AWS Lambda, reserve your slot here.

Serverless Sessions Currently Available (let us know if we missed any):

Intermediate Sessions

ARC201 — Comparing serverless and containers
Microservices are a great way to segment your application into well-defined, self-contained units of functionality. Come join us in this chalk talk as we discuss two common architectures for deploying microservices: containers and serverless.

Topic: Architecture
Speaker: Josh Kahn — Solutions Architect
Amazon Services — AWS Global Life Sciences Solutions Architect

ANT206-L — Leadership session: Trends with data lakes and analytics
AWS delivers an integrated suite of services that provides everything needed to quickly and easily build a well-governed data lake with self-serve access to data. In this talk, Rahul Pathak, general manager for Amazon Athena and Amazon EMR, talks about some of the key trends we’re seeing and describes how they shape the services AWS offers. Specific trends include the rise of machine-generated data and semi-structured/unstructured data as dominant sources of new data, the move toward serverless, SPI-centric computing, and the growing need for local access to data from users around the world.

Topic: Analytics
Speaker: Rahul Pathak

SVS208 — Orchestrate your serverless workflows with AWS Step Functions
Building a serverless workflow requires orchestration among various Lambda functions, as well as other AWS serverless services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS). In this session, you learn how to leverage AWS Step Functions to orchestrate your serverless workflows.Session

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: Fernando Dingler

SVS203-R — [REPEAT] Build a serverless ride-sharing web application
In this workshop, you deploy a simple web application that lets users request unicorn rides from the Wild Rydes fleet. The application presents users with an HTML-based user interface for indicating the location where they would like to be picked up and interfaces on the backend with a RESTful web service to submit the request and dispatch a nearby unicorn. The application also provides facilities for users to register with the service and log in before requesting rides.

Topic: Serverless

SVS202-R — [REPEAT] Building scalable ecommerce workflows with Step Functions
In this workshop, learn how to build a highly scalable retail backend platform using AWS Step Functions. We show you how to use several serverless services to build different workflows for different functionalities, including order processing, billing, notifications, and return notifications. We cover the basics, advanced patterns, and best practices for using AWS Step Functions, including local development and deployment automation using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: Diego Magalhaes — Sr. Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

ANT208-R — [REPEAT] Serverless ETL with Apache Spark and Python in AWS Glue
Join this small-group, hands-on exercise to a guided tour of how to create and run serverless extract, transform, and load (ETL) functions on AWS Glue. You learn how to work with both Apache Spark jobs and Python shell scripts to manage data integration for analytics. Bring your laptop.

Topic: Analytics
Speaker: Pranay Kaikini

SVS201-R — [REPEAT] Welcome to the zoo: Build a serverless theme-park app
In this workshop, Wyld Kingdom is a popular theme park rolling out a mobile app for 50,000 attendees today. The head of development has disappeared, and you are part of a group of developers assembling the piece left behind. The app helps theme-park visitors by providing real-time wait times, photo opportunities, notification alerts around the park, language translation for overseas visitors, and a location finder. Learn how to build a scalable serverless mobile app with limited development resources in under three hours.

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: James Beswick

DAT202-R — [REPEAT] What’s new in Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database with the speed, reliability, and availability of commercial databases at one-tenth the cost. In this session you get an overview of Aurora, including recently announced features, such as serverless, multi-master, and performance insights. We also help you get started using Aurora.

Topic: Databases
Speaker: Tony Petrossian

SVS205 — The when and how of building serverless microservices
Is your organization looking to move to microservices? In this session, we cover the fundamental concerns in moving to a microservices strategy, including how to decompose legacy applications, how and when to split a microservice, and how to isolate and interface between services. We also discuss common API architectural styles, including RESTful, RPC, GraphQL, and more.

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: TBD

ANT214 — VPC flow logs and Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Is your organization looking to move to microservices? In this session, we cover the fundamental concerns in moving to a microservices strategy, including how to decompose legacy applications, how and when to split a microservice, and how to isolate and interface between services. We also discuss common API architectural styles, including RESTful, RPC, GraphQL, and more.

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: Kevin Falls

Advanced Sessions:

WPS307 — Building a serverless GIS/geo-positioning and alerting solution
Traditional commercial geo-monitoring GPS solutions need servers running around the clock, require expensive mapping licenses, and only work with proprietary GPS devices that lack compatibility. In this talk, learn how to build a 100 percent serverless GIS/geo-monitoring GPS system using open data to visualize the geographic information without GIS licenses fees. Our solution has a built-in alerting system based on Amazon Connect and will be open to any device (IoT, mobile, GPS) to provide a geofencing capability.

Speaker: Daniel Bernao

MDS304 — Building your studio in the cloud
For any media production, creative talent is the core differentiator. Whether it’s a feature film, episodic content, live sports broadcast, or podcast, the artist’s time is more valuable than machine time. With today’s globally dispersed creative workforce, remote workflows are critical. A truly modern content production studio can scale and complement your artists’ time and talents with virtual workstations and a global collaboration pipeline. Learn how today’s studios are leveraging cloud-based rendering, machine learning, and computer vision as well as cloud storage and serverless on AWS using controls and frameworks approved by the security teams of leading content studios.

Topic: Media Solutions

SVS313 — Choosing your serverless framework and deployment toolchain
Have you wondered when you would want to use AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), AWS CloudFormation, or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)? In this session, learn the differences between AWS Amplify, AWS SAM, AWS CDK, AWS CodeStar, AWS CodePipeline, and more to help you choose your function scaffolding and deployment frameworks and toolchain.

Topic: Serverless

PNU303 — Data lakes and analytics for the digital utility
Utilities are reinventing themselves as digital businesses to deliver new products and services and frictionless customer experiences. How effectively you manage your data as a strategic asset is quickly becoming a competitive differentiator, especially in deregulated markets. In this session, we share our best practices for building a modern data platform for developing key insights using data lakes and some of the latest AWS database, data streaming, AI/ML, and analytics services. Next we dive deep as we answer questions from the audience about their data analytics challenges relevant to customer and asset insights in the Utility industry.

Speakers: Dirk Froehner & Mariano Kamp

ANT307 — Deep dive into Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Learn how customers are using Athena to query their data lakes, enable self-service for analysts and developers, and build applications. We dive deep into the latest improvements and show demos. New Athena users gain an understanding of service capabilities and customer architecture patterns. Existing Athena users gain understanding of recent improvements, including concurrency, performance, and security.

Topic: Analytics
Speakers: Janak Agarwal & Roy Hasson

SVS309 — Development life cycle for serverless backends
With serverless applications, you can easily get started, experiment, and build prototypes. However, as serverless usage grows and more developers adopt serverless, it can be hard to maintain a good workflow from ideas to production. In this talk, we share inspirations for how to build a good development workflow for serverless applications that allow for fast experimentation while sharing common standards across teams and organizations.

Topic: Serverless

SVS308 — How to build a full-stack serverless airline-booking application
As serverless computing grows in popularity, getting started can be challenging. In this talk, we pick a sample “airline ticketing” web app to demonstrate building a full-stack serverless application. We share tips and tricks for building your idea, creating a prototype, and deploying quickly and safely in production, including lessons we learned when building. You also learn how Vue.js applications can integrate with AWS AppSync (for GraphQL backends), Amazon API Gateway (for REST APIs), AWS Lambda functions, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon Cognito (for user management), using AWS Amplify to seamlessly provision and manage your cloud backend.

Topic: Serverless

MOB304 — Implement auth and authorization flows in your iOS apps
Learn how to leverage social-provider identity federation (log in with Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) as well as easily set up custom authentication flows configured and deployed by the AWS Amplify CLI. You do this hands-on by building and deploying a modern iOS app using AWS Amplify and serverless services. This workshop is suitable for all, even if you’re not a cloud expert. Please bring your own Mac with XCode already installed.

Topic: Mobile
Speakers: Sebastien Stormacq

ANT327 — Intuit: Moving from monitoring to observability using Amazon ES
As Intuit moves to a cloud hosting architecture that includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), containers, and serverless applications, the company is on an “observability” journey to transform the way it monitors its applications’ health. Observability requires correlating logs, metrics, traces, etc., which becomes complex as systems become more distributed. In this session, the company discusses leveraging tools such as Open Telemetry, Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), and Jaeger to build an observability solution, and the benefits this solution provides by giving visibility across the platform, from containers to serverless applications. They also discuss how they see observability evolving in coming years.

Topic: Analytics
Speaker: Jon Handler

DAT327-R — [REPEAT] Accelerating application development with Amazon Aurora
In this session, learn how to leverage the unique features of the Amazon Aurora platform to build faster, more scalable database applications optimized for the cloud. We discuss architectural best practices and features designed to help increase agility so you can develop applications faster to reach the widest possible audience, such as Amazon Aurora Serverless, read-replica auto scaling, cross-region replicas, backtracking, fast database cloning, and performance insights. Through a hands-on lab, we help you understand how to best take advantage of the Aurora platform’s capabilities to effectively accelerate application development.

Topic: Databases
Speakers: Rajesh Matkar & Steve Abraham

ARC313-R — [REPEAT] Architecting global storage with AWS Lambda
Companies are searching for ways to synchronize their assets to their production facilities around the world, both on-premises and in the cloud, using best practices with AWS technologies. In this session learn how you can use AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Directory Service, and AWS Fargate to build a serverless global storage platform to enable employee collaboration around the world.

Topic: Architecture
Speaker: Paul Roberts

ARC301-R — [REPEAT] Architecture patterns: Serverless stream processing at scale
Streaming application architectures are commonly used to solve real-time analytics requirements. Serverless architectures are a great fit for stream-processing applications because they enable you to lower operational costs and pay per execution, and they can seamlessly scale as your stream data rates vary. In this workshop, learn how to create serverless stream-processing architectures that can seamlessly scale as your needs grow. Get hands-on experience using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, and AWS Lambda to create real-time analytics pipelines. Learn how to ingest streaming data at scale and process it to generate real-time insights.

Topic: Architecture
Speakers:
Akhtar Hossain

MOB303-R — [REPEAT] Build and ship full-stack serverless apps with AWS Amplify
Learn how to use AWS AppSync and the AWS Amplify Framework to code, build, and deploy engaging full-stack serverless apps in React. We showcase how AWS AppSync provides data to your apps and lets you create robust, scalable GraphQL APIs to securely access and manipulate data from multiple sources, with both online and offline capabilities. See how the Amplify Framework simplifies building and connecting to a serverless backend with a powerful toolchain and resourceful library. Finally, learn how to deploy your app to the cloud using the AWS Amplify Console, which provides built-in hosting and out-of-the-box CI/CD capabilities. Please bring your own laptop.

Topic: Mobile
Speaker: Josh Kahn

SVS304-R — [REPEAT] Build a serverless engine to process large-scale documents
In this hands-on workshop, you build an application in under three hours that leverages AWS Lambda and Amazon Textract to extract text and data from large-scale documents. We use both asynchronous and synchronous architectural patterns to build an efficient document-processing engine.

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: Leonidas Drakopoulos

SVS302-R — [REPEAT] Build a serverless online game and real-time leaderboard
Every workload has a common pipeline for ingesting, processing, storing, and consuming data. If you are trying to ingest data in real time, what options are available to you? What are possible architectures? When should you use one service instead of another? Join this workshop for a discussion about possible strategies for implementing serverless architectures. While playing Alien Attack, learn about how to select the appropriate services for your needs, and how to leverage the same architecture for near-real-time processing in scenarios like sales reporting, financial transactions, IoT applications, and many more.

Topic: Serverless

SVS301-R — [REPEAT] Building a CI/CD pipeline for serverless applications
In this workshop, you learn how to start a new serverless project from scratch using AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) and build a continuous-delivery pipeline to automate builds, unit tests, and deployments using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeDeploy.

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: Fernando Dingler

ARC406-R — [REPEAT] Building multi-region microservices
In this session, participate in a hands-on exercise where you create, verify, and test a serverless solution across multiple regions using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB global tables.

Topic: Architecture
Speaker: Edin Zulich

API305-R — [REPEAT] Building serverless machine-learning workflows
Modern machine-learning workflows leverage AWS services such as Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend to extract, validate, mutate, and enrich your data. Some drive transactional systems that use ML to generate metadata, others derive insights by visualizing customer-interaction sentiment. All share a common challenge: orchestrating a combination of sequential and parallel steps fulfilled by independent microservices. Join us as we examine how workflows can be used to manage that orchestration in a way that’s scalable, reliable, and easy to maintain and run. We contrast two approaches for creating such workflows: a traditional monolithic approach and a serverless approach utilizing AWS Step Functions.

Speaker: Luay Kawasme

DAT335-R — [REPEAT] Build serverless apps with Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda
Join us for this first-ever advanced-design, best-practices interactive workshop designed to demonstrate the breadth of AWS serverless offerings and how the components work together. We will look at the evolution of a ecommerce company that starts with a low-effort serverless product catalog, then iterates to scale to a million daily users, and then adds analytics and near-real-time monitoring. As we progress through the workshop, you’ll get deep dives into AWS serverless services such as Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Kinesis.

Topic: Databases
Speakers: Jeff DeMuth & Sang Kong

DAT321-R — [REPEAT] Deep dive on Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility
Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database service that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. With Aurora, we’ve completely reimagined how databases are built for the cloud, providing you higher performance, availability, and durability than previously possible. In this session, we dive deep into the architectural details of Aurora with MySQL compatibility, and we review recent innovations, such as parallel query, backtrack, serverless, and multi-master.

Topic: Databases
Speaker: Sirish Chandrasekaran

ARC316-R — [REPEAT] Deploy and monitor a serverless application
When building serverless applications, you need to know the design tradeoffs for improving performance in addition to how well your application is performing. What are the bottlenecks, time sinks, and bugs? Amazon Elasticsearch Service — with its ability to ingest, correlate search, and visualize data in near real time from different sources — is an ideal solution. In this workshop, you build on a bookstore application and add detailed monitoring and tracing across the stack. You’ll flow data from Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda (via AWS X-Ray) to Amazon ES, build visualizations, identify performance problems, and implement performance improvements to the application.

Topic: Architecture
Speakers: Jon Handler & Safeer Mohiuddin

ANT302-R — [REPEAT] Embedding analytics into your application with Amazon QuickSight
Learn how you can quickly and efficiently enhance your applications with rich interactive data visualizations and analytics capabilities without any custom development. Embedded Amazon QuickSight dashboards allow you to utilize Amazon QuickSight’s serverless architecture and easily scale your insights with your growing user base while ensuring you only pay for usage with Amazon QuickSight’s unique pay-per-session pricing model.

Topic: Analytics
Speaker: Jose Kunnackal John

ARC309-R — [REPEAT] Hands-on: Building a multi-region active-active solution
Do you need a highly available global application? Join us to build a global serverless application with active-active multi-region architectures using Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Route 53. You must bring your own laptop and have an AWS account and a Facebook developer account for this session. This hands-on workshop includes using a Route 53 domain, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Cognito, AWS Cloud9, and other services in the Ireland and Singapore regions.

Topic: Architecture
Speakers: Eng-Hwa Tan & Jay Shin

SVS305-R — [REPEAT] How to secure your serverless APIs
In this workshop, you learn techniques to secure a serverless application built with AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Aurora. We cover AWS services and features you can leverage to improve the security of a serverless applications in five domains.

Topic: Serverless
Speaker: Angela Wang

DAT306-R — [REPEAT] Implement microservice architectures with Amazon DynamoDB & AWS Lambda
In this chalk talk, we start with building blocks for reliable event delivery in microservice architectures using Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda. We then discuss how to use these building blocks to implement eventually consistent transactional behavior and support for querying using Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern in serverless microservices. Along the way, we discuss the trade-offs and benefits of event-driven over request/response designs, and we go into the details of tuning DynamoDB- and Lambda-based reliable delivery and processing pipelines for scale, performance, and cost.

Topic: Databases
Speaker: Edin Zulich

MGT308-R — [REPEAT] Monitoring modern apps: Containers, microservices, and more
Whether containers or serverless functions, communicating over service mesh or not, the need for holistic monitoring and management of modern applications remains. In this session, we dive deep into what it takes to successfully monitor modern applications with Amazon CloudWatch, which provides a monitoring, management, and alerting service natively in AWS. We discuss best practices for collecting logs, metrics, and traces in AWS, so you can proactively detect malicious activities, speed up insight discovery, and troubleshoot your application and infrastructure issues faster.

Topic: Management Tools & Governance

DAT336-R — [REPEAT] Process data using cloud databases and serverlesstechnologies
Organizations have disparate datasets and may find it challenging to process data and drive business outcomes. In this workshop, we leverage AWS managed database services and serverless technologies to help replicate, manage, and analyze data using an MLB dataset. We replicate a SQL Server database to Amazon Aurora Serverless using AWS Database Migration Service. We also use AWS Glue, a serverless ETL service, to transform and load the data to Amazon S3. Then, we use Amazon Athena to analyze data using SQL to enable better business decisions. For this workshop, you need an AWS account, some experience with databases and SQL, and your laptop.

Topic: Databases
Speakers: Prahlad Rao & Shree Kenghe

API301-R — [REPEAT] Securing data in serverless applications and services
In this chalk talk, we walk you through the process of designing a serverless application that secures customer data sent to the cloud. The design uses features recently introduced by Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), including AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys for encrypting messages at rest and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints powered by AWS PrivateLink for sending messages without traversing the public internet. These techniques are security best practices for systems that deal with private data, such as e-commerce orders, candidate resumes, or employee information.

Speaker: Otavio Ferreira

ARC307-R — [REPEAT] Serverless architectural patterns and best practices
As serverless architectures become more popular, customers need a framework of patterns to help them identify how to leverage AWS to deploy their workloads without managing servers or operating systems. This session describes reusable serverless patterns while considering costs. For each pattern, we provide operational and security best practices and discuss potential pitfalls and nuances. We also discuss the considerations for moving an existing server-based workload to a serverless architecture. This session can help you recognize candidates for serverless architectures in your own organizations and understand areas of potential savings and increased agility.

Topic: Architecture

ARC310-R — [REPEAT] Serverless data lake patterns for voice, vision, and ML
Industry 4.0 demands greater insight into data to bring people, processes, and equipment together. In this workshop, we illustrate how to gain business insights from video and voice data sources, highlighting the data pipeline. We ingest source feeds, efficiently store the data, and perform advanced analytics using AWS ML services and analysis tools. Typical applications include anomaly detection (detecting spills or hazardous objects and predictive maintenance) and voice-sentiment analysis (customer service insights). By the end of the session, you will be able to quickly analyze data for uncommon characteristics using those detections to initiate a wide variety of actions.

Topic: Architecture
Speaker: Paul Armstrong

AIM303-R — [REPEAT] Stop guessing: Use AI to understand customer conversations
You don’t need to be a data scientist to build an AI application. In this workshop, we show you how to use AWS AI services to build a serverless application that can help you understand your customers. Analyze call-center recordings with the help of automatic speech recognition (ASR), translation, and natural language processing (NLP). Get hands-on by producing your own call recordings using Amazon Connect. In the last step, you set up a processing pipeline to automate transcription and NLP analysis, and run analytics and visualizations on the results.

Topic: Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

ANT313-R — [REPEAT] Understanding AWS Glue architectures for scale and security
Do you have questions about how AWS Glue works? Join this chalk talk to learn more about the architectures and technical design decisions built into the service. Discover how to get the most from AWS Glue for scalable and secure serverless data integration with Apache Spark and Python shell.

Topic: Analytics
Speakers: Chanu Damarla & Ben Sowell

API304 — Scalable serverless architectures using event-driven design
Serverless architectures free you to focus on solving business problems without the burden of managing infrastructure on AWS. However, building serverless applications requires a change in architectural thinking. In this session, learn how to use powerful event-driven design patterns to architect highly scalable solutions that are enterprise-grade, robust, and cost-effective. We showcase how to use AWS Lambda combined with messaging services such as Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), to improve time to market while delivering great-quality service.

Speakers: Luay Kawasme, Fernando Dingler & Assaji Aluwahre

SVS310 — Securing enterprise-grade serverless apps
Learn how to secure enterprise-grade serverless applications. We cover the strategies you can use to build secure applications running on AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. Then, we review how you can audit and monitor your applications using tools like AWS Config. We also show you how to mitigate some of the most common security vulnerabilities.

Topic: Serverless

PNU301 — Smart meters, data lakes, and serverless for utilities
In this session, we review the business drivers, benefits, and technical architecture switching from a legacy meter data system to one based on AWS services. A major EU utility needed to ingest 12.5 billion raw data points from smart meters that generated 288 million messages per day. Learn how they switched from monolith applications based on application servers and relational databases to a reengineered, redesigned serverless application based on AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, and — in its newest version — AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Greengrass. We end the session by highlighting lessons learned and benefits gained.

Speakers: Stefano Sandrini & Giuseppe Porcelli

SVS311 — That’s nice, but my workload can’t be serverless
You may face certain challenges migrating your existing applications to the serverless platform: request-timeout limits, at-least-once execution/delivery, and optimizing their architecture for cost at high volumes, to name a few. In this session, we discuss patterns for helping applications that weren’t designed to operate within these constraints run on the serverless platform.

Topic: Serverless

Expert Sessions

GPSTEC406 — AWS Alien Attack workshop
Although this Global Partner Summit workshop is open to anyone, it is geared toward current and potential AWS Partner Network Partners. This AWS Alien Attack workshop is a serverless adventure where we show you how to build a serverless game environment and leverage real-time data processing, and how the same architecture can be applied to different contexts (like sales reporting, financial transactions, and IoT scenarios). We teach you about each layer (security, ingestion/consumption, processing, storing) and how to select the right service for each. From there, you are guided through the process of building your own version of the game.

GPSTEC404 — Build an AI to play blackjack
Although this Global Partner Summit workshop is open to anyone, it is geared toward current and potential AWS Partner Network Partners. This AWS Alien Attack workshop is a serverless adventure where we show you how to build a serverless game environment and leverage real-time data processing, and how the same architecture can be applied to different contexts (like sales reporting, financial transactions, and IoT scenarios). We teach you about each layer (security, ingestion/consumption, processing, storing) and how to select the right service for each. From there, you are guided through the process of building your own version of the game.

FSI402 — Create a dynamic pricing engine using serverless technology
To meet changing customer expectations, financial institutions need the ability to rapidly deploy new pricing formulas. In the past, this was very difficult to achieve using in-house software, which could require weeks of work with IT departments. This session shows you how to build a rating solution using serverless technology that makes rapid development, deployment, and modification of pricing models possible. The session also delves into a CI/CD approach that allows developers to develop and deploy their lambda code from their local workstation.

Speaker: John Lucking

ANT409 — Getting started with streaming data and Amazon Kinesis
In this session, we walk through how to build a simple, end-to-end streaming architecture using Amazon Kinesis and AWS Lambda. We cover how continuous, serverless processing works, and the best practices for taking a simple app and getting it into production. Please come prepared with an active AWS account and your laptop.

Topic: Analytics

DAT402 — Going deep on Amazon Aurora Serverless
Amazon Aurora Serverless is a configuration for Amazon Aurora (MySQL and PosgreSQL-compatible editions) where the database automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application’s needs. In this session, we discuss how Aurora Serverless supports infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable workloads, and we provide tips for building your next application on a serverless database.

Topic: Databases
Speaker: Anoop Gupta

HLC401 — Healthcare data interoperability: HL7 and FHIR
Learn how to utilize AWS services for serverless processing, such as AWS Lambda and the Amazon API Gateway, to facilitate secure development and deployment of a Health Level Seven International (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) interface that supports data interoperability. Using the AWS Code family of tools for development, you walk through several message examples and learn how to address common API development needs and deploy a sample interface for HL7 FHIR on AWS. Learn how to use AWS X-Ray to take a look inside the sample interface and examine the path of calls.

Speaker: Mithun Mallick

ALX401 — Learn how to handle data in your Alexa skills
Alexa skills can use data from different sources in different ways, as well as looking to store that data in different ways — but which is the best for a given use case? What tradeoffs play into that decision, and what are the best practices that should be applied? The serverless architecture of AWS Lambda aligns well with Alexa skills, but which techniques and AWS data-related services align with both these use cases and the serverless approach? You don’t need to be a DB admin (SQL, NoSQL, or otherwise) to learn how to handle data in your Alexa skills.

Topic: Alexa

IOT403-R — [REPEAT] Building predictive applications with IoT and machine learning
In this workshop, we demonstrate the simplicity and speed of building an end-to-end solution in a serverless manner. You’ll build an end-to-end solution for analyzing industrial asset data in real time and detecting anomalies. You’ll also get a step-by-step guide, including a deep dive into the solution using AWS services such as AWS IoT Core, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and Kibana.

Topic: IoT
Speakers: Neeraj Kumar & Amit Narayanan

DOP401-R — [REPEAT] CI/CD for serverless and containerized applications
Continuous-integration and continuous-delivery (CI/CD) techniques enable teams to increase agility and quickly release a high-quality product. In this talk, we walk you through best practices for building CI/CD workflows to enable you to manage your serverless and containerized applications. We cover infrastructure-as-code application models, such as the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), and we show you how to set up CI/CD release pipelines with AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild. Finally, we discuss automating safer deployments using AWS CodeDeploy.

Topic: DevOps

SEC403-R — [REPEAT] Serverless identity management, authentication, and authorization
In this workshop, you learn how to build a serverless microservices application demonstrating end-to-end authentication and authorization using Amazon Cognito, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and all things AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). You have the opportunity to build an end-to-end functional app with a secure identity provider showcasing user authentication patterns. To participate, you need a laptop, an active AWS Account, an AWS IAM administrator, and familiarity with core AWS services.

Topic: Security, Compliance, and Identity
Speakers: Greg McConnel & Jesse Fuchs

PNU401 — Use APIs to add speech AI to your Utility customer-care apps
AWS services put AI in the hands of developer. Consequently, you don’t need to be a data scientist to join this session. We discuss and then build the architecture of a serverless AI workload relevant for Energy/Utility retailers (or any industry with customer contact centers): The automated analysis of call recordings using AWS automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) services. You leave this session with a solid understanding of how you can use AWS AI services to easily add intelligence to all of your applications. Please bring your laptop and access to an AWS account.

Speaker: Dirk Froehner

About IOpipe

As the leader in serverless dev tooling for monitoring and observability, IOpipe offers real-time visibility into the most granular behaviors of today’s serverless applications on AWS Lambda.

Founded in 2016 by Erica Windisch and Adam Johnson, IOpipe reduces debugging time from hours to seconds, delivers transparent insights into the behaviors and performance of your serverless functions, and reduces risk for enterprises shifting to serverless.

Working with global brands like Matson, Rackspace, and APM Music, IOpipe empowers engineering teams to deliver with confidence, debug intelligently, and get busy building the impossible.

In other words, IOpipe makes it a lot more fun to be a developer. Visit www.iopipe.com to learn more and try it for free.

--

--