Last week I attended AWS IMAGINE in Austin, TX. Ignoring the travel difficulties I and many other attendees had as we were tossed about in the lingering flotsam of the Crowdstrike shipwreck, it was really a worthwhile trip and a great event.
If you have waded into the AWS conference-o-sphere you are probably familiar with re:Invent, the main AWS conference held each year in Las Vegas with over 60,000 attendees. There are also one-day Summits held around the world, and the also-a-Summit-but-not-like-the-others Summit, the DC Public Sector Summit. The DC Summit is free, held at the spacious DC convention center, and is a much more manageable 15,000 people. There is plenty of meaningful content, including a reasonable amount that is higher ed specific. It is easy to get around the event itself and it is smack in the middle of DC, so there a lot to see and do.
I greatly prefer the DC Summit to re:Invent, but at the end of the day I’m a casual atmosphere, intimate presentations, meaningful hallway conversation, and breakfast with a leader kind of guy. You need an even smaller event for that kind of quality connection. AWS IMAGINE is just that event. IMAGINE is also a free event. (Have you seen the price of re:Invent?). It has a lot of great sessions for the research and education community, more on that below. And the best part? Only 800 people. Yes! Sessions were full, but there was always a seat. After the talk, you could walk up and chat with the presenters, whether it was CIOs, researchers, directors of research, or AWS leaders.
There were multiple compelling sessions in each time slot. When there were two or more I wanted to see, higher education focus was the tie-breaker for me. One of the first was a great panel discussion on research in the cloud with Jason Armbruster from UC Boulder and Josh Kissee from Baylor.
Naturally, there were some sessions on GenAI, but refreshingly, not too many. One was a compelling discussion with the Illinois Institute of Technology team about how they were using GenAI to improve the efficiency and accuracy of their graduate admissions process. Particularly cool was Dr. Adam Kiefer, Assistant Professor of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina, showing several innovative and practical applications of training models to create novel applications to improve athletic performance.
My favorite session, and the one I heard the most buzz about after, was a discussion with Andrew Marcontell and William Deigaard of Texas A&M talking about how they have moved from an institution trying to wrap its arms around the cloud and demands to use it around campus to a point today where they have automated many processes and are now able to scale and protect the use of hyper-scale technologies. Not only was it a compelling story of all they’d accomplished, leaving many more than a bit envious, but they gave a big shout-out to the role the community of their peers played in their evolution. This community’s willingness to collaborate and share is our superpower!
IMAGINE is a great place for making connections. There was a small expo floor where you could have meaningful conversations with vendors (Four Points Technology was in the house) and AWS teams. I had a great chat with Jess Gilmore from the Training and Certification Education Programs team where I learned about several innovations with AWS Academy. I had lunch outdoors on a covered patio and chatted with a variety of colleagues old and new, including friend of the community and AWS Principal Solutions Architect Kevin Murakoshi. We brainstormed about a series of barn-raising sessions we think would benefit the community. I accomplished so much in two short days. It’s is worth the trip if you value quality over quantity, and substance over hype.
Speaking of the trip, I woke Wednesday morning to a text from Delta telling me my flight had been pushed back and I was only going to have 7 min to make my connection in ATL. Unless I was leaving on the plane I was flying in on, that wasn’t going to happen. Several flight changes later I was departing Thursday morning instead, meaning I had Wednesday evening to take a look around Austin a bit.
I’ll sum up my IMAGINE feelings with this little ditty you can sing along to. (Picture yourself accompanied by a piano fully engulfed in flames floating down the Seine.)
Imagine there’s no crowds
It’s easy if you try
No lines to kill or die for
And no venue-switching too
Imagine all the people
Attending sessions in peace
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope next year you’ll join us
And the community can be as one