I felt that the keynote – including APAC and global AWS executives and three customers – was far too long and that a lot of the content could have been trimmed.

The highlight of the day, for me, was James Bromberger’s overview of your first week with Amazon EC2. He very quickly described the first few steps of using EC2 including: security groups, RDS, monitoring with CloudWatch, using multiple availability zones, auto-scaling, IAM, and CloudFormer.

This was closely followed by Simon Elisha about continuous deployment practices, with production, test and development environments running on AWS. I’m always interested in learning more about CI and CD (one of these days I’ll even use them) and this was an interesting, though not terribly detailed, discussion of CI and CD using AWS.

The other sessions I saw were interesting enough but quite high-level and I got the impression that they were aimed at CIOs and managers and the like. I got enough out of it to not regret going, but I don’t think I’ll go to another similar event.

If nothing else, I learned about the AWS Podcast which I’m finding quite interesting, if a little marketing-y.