King Of The Cloud: 15 Sights And Scenes From AWS re:Invent 2017

Revisiting re:Invent

The Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference that storms Las Vegas every winter has become the glamour event of the industry, bringing business leaders and engineers from prestigious startups and name-brand technology heavyweights together with channel partners for four days of networking, demonstrations, keynotes, and an endless parade of parties that fill restaurants across Sin City every night of the conference.

For the sixth straight year, massive crowds flowed through the Venetian Hotel's convention center as attendees made their way to sessions. To ease the congestion, Amazon spread the event across several hotels this year. Most partner events, including the Global Partner Summit, channel chief Terry Wise's keynote, as well as the one delivered by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, took place at a stadium inside the MGM Grand.

CEO Superstar

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy was busy promoting a range of new AWS capabilities across machine learning, container management, databases and the Internet of Things at re:Invent. He also made an appearance at the Global Partner Summit keynote to discuss the traits he's observed in successful partners.

After his main keynote on Wednesday, Jassy sat down with reporters to discuss the forces driving innovation at AWS, and the cloud leader's strategies for technological and business development.

Enter The Ninja

A cartoonish AWS Ninja greeted attendees to a special late-night keynote in which Peter Desantos, vice president of Amazon's global infrastructure, shared the story of how AWS revolutionized the industry by building pioneering public cloud infrastructure.

Desantos, the engineer behind the creation of AWS EC2 instances, also announced a new bare-metal offering from the cloud leader.

Ask An Expert

AWS pros, from engineers to product leaders, were available on the re:Invent exhibit floor to offer technical and business guidance to partners and customers. The Cloud Café was a good place to find an expert, or just mingle while looking down on the action taking place below.

Cisco

The networking leader had a highly visible presence at re:Invent, where it shared with AWS partners and customers a broad range of solutions enabling hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Cisco and AWS have found a common calling in facilitating large Internet of Things deployments.

Partners are finding opportunities to connect Cisco's Jasper IoT management platform to Amazon's back-end infrastructure.

High Striker

A man tests his strength on an old-fashioned high-striker game brought to the conference by Cisco.

Cloudability

The cloud cost-control vendor had an impressive booth that helped keep re:Invent attendees hydrated and caffeinated. The startup based in Portland, Ore., enables customers to manage their cloud bills, right-size infrastructure, and avoid wasteful spending as they adopt complex infrastructure and hybrid environments.

Cognizant

Channel powerhouse Cognizant Technology Solutions showcased its AWS solutions in a busy booth on the exhibit floor.

The AWS Premier consulting partner, reseller and MSP discussed with re:Invent attendees how it could accelerate digital business transformations on Amazon infrastructure and implement hybrid cloud environments.

Deloitte

AWS re:Invent attendees who swung through the Deloitte Digital booth not only got to talk digital transformation with one of Amazon Web Services' largest consulting partners, but also had a chance to spin a "Price is Right" style wheel.

MongoDB

MongoDB, a vendor of an open-source database platform, last month became a public company.

In the spirit of a recent IPO, its impressive AWS re:Invent exhibit was unmistakably green.

Palo Alto Networks

The Palo Alto Networks booth on the re:Invent exhibit floor offered an inviting environment in which to discuss warding off uninvited visitors to enterprise networks.

The next-gen security vendor was announced at the conference as an inaugural integration partner for Amazon GuardDuty, a new threat detection service.

Rackspace

Ever since entering a game-changing agreement to partner with AWS two years ago, Rackspace has been a major presence at the cloud leader's events, including this year's re:Invent conference.

The managed cloud company based in San Antonio showcased its offer of Fanatical Support for AWS for customers visiting its booth on the exhibit floor.

Salesforce

The CRM leader has a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services, which hosts some Salesforce application and platform workloads on its cloud. Salesforce representatives discussed with visitors to the company's re:Invent booth how they could innovate with the Salesforce Heroku platform alongside AWS.

The furry mascots at the booth traveled to Las Vegas from the Dreamforce conference that was held a few weeks ago in San Francisco.

Trend Micro

The high-flying Trend Micro booth at re:Invent wowed visitors with its aeronautical theme.

Cloud security demos were presented with all the comfort of a first-class flight.

Cloud Technology Partners

The AWS systems integrator recently acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise welcomed visitors to an impressive booth on the re:Invent floor, where its cloud experts showcased enterprise offerings around migrations, management, security and compliance.

The old arcade games were also a major attraction.

Women In Tech

Deloitte Digital hosted a mixer where women in the tech industry gathered to network, share insights and empower each other.