A couple of weeks ago, JT and I popped over to America’s playground, Las Vegas for a week to attend the Amazon Web Services Re:Invent conference. Here’s what we got up to.
Why Vegas?
Amazon’s first ever Web Services conference had over 6,000 attendees. It was on a scale unlike anything we’d seen before, so they needed a city that could match it. Everything was taking place at the Sands Expo Center which sits right under the Venetian and Palazzo Casino and Hotel complex.
Visualising Amazon
What may be a surprise to some, we didn’t travel over 5,000 miles just for a game of poker or two. We were actually invited by Amazon themselves to visualise the usage of AWS around the world with real-time data.
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to show how insanely huge and awesome Amazon Web Services has become.” – Matt Wood, Chief Data Scientist, Amazon Web Services.
So among the team we spent weeks coming up with ideas and throwing sketches and mockups around between ourselves and the AWS team until we got three visualisations that we were all keen on.
Here’s what we came up with:
JT had his own lair operations room tucked inside the centre of Amazon Booth where he could control what was shown on the 2 sets of 6 LCD screens outside. It was pretty exciting (and nerve racking) to be responsible for the data visualisations sitting right under the Amazon logo, but we kept our cool and pulled off something that we’re extremely proud of. We’ll be talking more about how we created the visualisations on the blog soon. Stay tuned!
Amazon knows how to throw a party
No need for words.
GoSquared on tour
Continuing GoSquared’s stratospheric growth
The Stratosphere is the tallest free standing observation tower in the US. It’s 350m tall, making it even taller than one of my favourite buildings in the world, The Shard, back in little London.
Ocean’s 112
We couldn’t resist watching Ocean’s 11 just before heading to Vegas. Pretty much all of our knowledge of the place has been based on this film until now. I guess I’m glad we didn’t watch The Hangover too.
Cashing out
