AWS re:Invent Event Recap
Last week, Team Lens, alongside Mirantis, had the opportunity to attend the Lens team's first “real” in-person event, AWS re:Invent. Unlike the previous year, re:Invent 2021 was truly a hybrid event, meaning virtual and in-person attendance. This, of course, is the biggest event we attended since 2019. The estimated total in-person attendance was north of 20,000 masked individuals, and more than 500 technical sessions.
AWS re:Invent 2021 was the first Amazon conference Mirantis sponsored, and I'm happy to share that we will be attending re:Invent 2022. AWS re:Invent did a wonderful job following health care guidelines and keeping all attendees and sponsors safe. It was an exciting sight to see and gave us confidence that in-person events are here to stay!
What We Learned
What made this event remarkable was the ability to learn from the attendees and other sponsors. The biggest takeaway from re:Invent is that while we sometimes take Kubernetes adoption as a given, in the real world, Kubernetes adoption is still early. Many organizations are just beginning their Kubernetes journey.
From the conversations we had, the main reason for this is that Kubernetes is perceived to be complex and cumbersome. Although Kubernetes is a fantastic technology for scaling your container initiatives, organizations need highly skilled DevOps teams in order to see a proper return on investment. It's something we have thought a lot about, and it's why we introduced DevOpsCare powered by Lens, which takes much of the burden off their shoulders by enabling Mirantis to essentially act as your DevOps team - no matter what distribution of Kubernetes you're using.
Our Users
What truly made the event worthwhile for us was the opportunity to meet with our power users and customers. We had more than 500 outstanding conversations with our power users. We shared our latest release, Lens 5.3, with the highlight of hosted dev clusters. Lens hosted dev clusters are personal Kubernetes environments built to allow anyone the opportunity to get up and running with Kubernetes easily. Demoing the new release to our users in real time was awesome. They shared the great, the good and the ugly, giving us a ton to think about on our flights home.
All in all, sponsoring an in-person event for the first time in 2021 was magical. We are looking forward to many more events in the near future. For now, stay safe, everyone.
