I arrived for my first AWS Summit the night before on Tuesday and received a warm welcome from the kreuzwerker colleagues in the lobby of the hotel where we were staying. As always, the team was in good spirits. Thirty minutes of jokes and pleasantries and five hours of sleep set the stage for the first day of the Summit.
kreuzwerker was represented in booth B02. Everybody who got off the train at the “Gleisdreieck” stop, the Summit-adjoining station, knew that because five beautiful posters had been put up there.
For a lot of people that I spoke to, and also myself, the size of the event and the absence of any mask or distancing mandates almost felt like a return to normalcy, which made it possible to enjoy these two days to the (interpersonal) fullest.
AWS and its ecosystem of platform users and customers, which continues to expanding rapidly, is vast and impressive; the event, the many speakers and the dozens of companies present at the Summit were a splendid testimony to that.
Of the countless presentations and speeches given at the Summit (though obviously I didn’t see all of them), I would like to highlight the presentation which impressed me the most. It demonstrated a mission that exceeds common business and efficiency needs addressed by a migration of workloads to the cloud. Ana Popic, in the Keynote Hall, talked about how AWS helps Centogene analyze genetic samples quickly and efficiently, providing immense support to their mission of fighting rare diseases. This is as good a use case for compute power as I have ever seen.
AWS’ strategy of letting their users and customers tell their story, in my humble opinion, works like a charm. They can endlessly talk about and showcase their services and offerings in the most granular detail (which happens to an extent in the technical talks). None of these demos is as effective as a successful example of how it is put to use in the real world when conveying the company’s purpose. AWS and its users feed off each other and form a mutually appreciative symbiosis that is fascinating to observe. The greatest cloud platform would be pointless without workloads that run on it. And truly great workloads, many of which make up big chunks of modern life as we know it, need the most well developed platform to reach their full potential.
The Summit, from what I have seen, serves another major purpose: communicating, echoing and reinforcing how the job is done right. In a fast moving industry that is as crowded as ours, new rules, ways to do it better, best practices and knowledge emerge every day. Neither AWS nor its customers are hesitant to share these findings with the world, including the competition. This creates a refreshing “we are all in this together” feeling. But in a world of eight billion people who all want apps, progress and automation, everybody probably knows that the market is big enough for all the good businesses and ideas.
The Summit was also one of the always welcomed opportunities of meeting other kreuzwerker. As I usually work remotely, this usually happens on Zoom or in a Google Meet. I enjoy working remotely and the freedom it brings, but real world interaction is something that is simply poorly substituted by a computer screen. Working for a company which prioritizes interpersonal relations, where the atmosphere is a relaxed display of trust and appreciation with friendly faces all around, truly makes every gathering a gratifying affair that makes you look forward to the next.
I am excited about working with this fascinating technology in the future, and for interesting clients with their various plans and needs. I am even more excited about doing this as a part of the kreuzwerker crew. In the process, I hope I can live up to the standards of excellence, which this industry adheres to.