AWS re:Invent 2021- Day 3

Day 3 at the conference kicked off in a similar fashion to the previous days – coffee to fuel up for the first sessions in the morning!

My first session of the day was delivered by David Press & Ashwin Raghuraman – “Riot Games at the edge: Launching Valorant with AWS Outposts”.

Riot released their newest first-person shooter game last year, and the breakout session focussed on how the team utilised various AWS services to optimise and enhance their network latency issues for the players.

Even though AWS has regions all over the globe and applications can be deployed across multiple regions to resolve issues with latency – Riot games still saw issues with latency with users who may not be very close to any of the pre-defined AWS regions. In order to improve latency in this scenario, Riot games utilised AWS outpost to bring game servers geographically closer to their players. The benefits of using outposts over building a datacenter was that AWS handles the installing of the rack, connects to the network and initially provisions the required resources to get it off the ground, so it acts just like a managed region. Another couple of advantages that outposts offer is that that resources show up in the console and you can also still use terraform to provision your specific resources.

All Builders Welcome events

This year I have been lucky enough to receive the All Builders Welcome (ABW) grant to attend re:invent in person. The ABW program goal is to increase the number of underrepresented technologists participating in the innovation economy through educational content, partnerships, and programs — by providing amazing opportunities like this re:invent grant to people all over the world.

Today I got to take part in an interview with the ABW team to share more information about my career and to talk about how attending re:invent will help enhance my journey in tech — which I honestly believe it will. We are only half way through re:invent and already I have learnt so much from the many breakout sessions I have attended and love that there is the opportunity to ask questions and chat to speakers after the sessions. Attending re:invent in person has also not only increased my technical knowledge but has allowed me to make so many more connections that I can reach out to for support in the future.

This evening there was also a restaurant reception hosted by the All Builders Welcome team. This was a great opportunity to network with the other grant recipients and learn more about their backgrounds and careers. This event was also was open to all other conference attendees to come along, so again it was a great way to meet new people and share more about the ABW program with them.

I would recommend for everyone to look out for the different initiatives created from this program, as they are absolutely fantastic.

Wow, what a crazy few days it has been, tomorrow will be my last day at the conference – so I’ll have one more blog to come, with tomorrows keynote and my highlights of the week!