Evolve Or Die: AWS re:Invent 2022

AWS re:Invent is just such a great time of learning, connecting, and getting pumped up! It’s one of my favorite weeks. Maybe it was the nostalgia of Martin Garrix again DJ’ing the party this year — I went back and read the blog post I wrote after my first re:Invent in 2016. That year Andy Jassy wrapped up his keynote saying that he believed the next 10 years would produce markedly more innovation than the first 10 years of the cloud. I remember feeling like that would be a tall order but 6 years later I’m still impressed with how much innovation there continues to be.

Werner Vogels talked about how the nature of the cloud is asynchronous and event driven and stressed how this is the architectural foundation for the future. “Build systems that can evolve. And the best way to make evolvable systems is to focus on event driven architecture.”

The serverless ecosystem was bolstered further this week with several announcements including EventBridge pipes, which lets you stitch events together with little or no code, similar to how we “pipe” a chain of commands together on the terminal. “Only code as a last resort” was a key takeaway from a session on this. Lambda should transform not transport, use configuration wherever possible.

It changes the game to know that you can build something that is both amazingly affordable and at the same time built to handle massive levels of scalability. Leveraging event driven serverless architecture we’re now in a position to develop serious enterprise grade apps that cost basically nothing when dormant, can handle thousands of users on lunch money, and are designed around elasticity for future growth. That’s empowering to me, and once again I left re:Invent this year inspired to go build something!