AWS re:Invent 2024 — My Selection Of Sessions

In this post, you will find my opinionated list of AWS re:Invent 24 breakout sessions, workshops, builder sessions, code-talks, dev chats, and chalk talks that I found relevant to Serverless or highly interesting in general.

Don’t forget to read my guide to AWS re:Invent — tips and tricks.

You can find my complete session list over at reinvent planner.

This blog post was originally published on my website, “Ran The Builder.”

Table of Contents

1. Session Types

2. Session Levels

3. My Breakout Session

4. Levels 100–200

5. Level 300

6. Level 400

7. Heroes/Community Track

8. Non Serverless But Highly Recommended

Session Types

**Breakout sessions — **lecture-style and run 45 to 60 minutes. Often includes 10–15 minutes of Q&A.

**Builders’ sessions — **These one-hour hands-on sessions have ten attendees and one AWS expert per table. Each builders’ session begins with a short explanation or demo of what you are going to build. There is no formal presentation. It’s just you, your laptop, and the AWS expert.

**Chalk talks — **highly interactive whiteboarding sessions with AWS experts. Expect a lively technical discussion, centered around real-world architecture challenges, with a small group of experts and peers. These sessions run for 60 minutes.

**Workshops — **a two-hour interactive sessions where you work in small teams to solve real problems using AWS services. Each workshop starts with a short lecture (10 to 15 minutes) by the main speaker, and the rest of the time is spent working as a group. Don’t forget to bring your laptop to these workshops.

*Code Talk *— Engaging, code-focused sessions with a small audience. AWS experts lead a live coding discussion as they explain the why behind AWS solutions.

Dev Chat — shorter community driven session make. Get insights from AWS customers.

Session Levels

There are four levels: 100, 200, 300, and 400.

The 100–200 (Foundational *& *Intermediate) levels are excellent for a Serverless beginner.

If you build Serverless applications daily, target the 300–400 (advanced & expert*)* levels and only go to 100–200 for sessions in unfamiliar subjects (perhaps containers, data-related, or machine learning).

The complete catalog can be found at:

https://hub.reinvent.awsevents.com/attendee-portal/catalog/

But I highly suggest you use this alternative and better catalog to build your sessions list:

https://reinvent-planner.cloud/

Let’s go over my recommended sessions.

My Breakout Session

SVS401 | Breakout Session | Best practices for serverless developers

I’m thrilled to share that I will be co-presenting a breakout session at AWS re:Invent 2024 with Julian Wood.

This session provides architectural best practices, optimizations, and useful shortcuts that experts can use to build secure, high-scale, and high-performance serverless applications.

I will add insights and best practices from my perspective, as I have been running production workloads on Serverless for the past four years.

Levels 100–200

SEG101 | Breakout | Adopting the SaaS mindset to drive growth

Learn about AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and event-driven integration services, discover how to build your first serverless application, and learn how to handle multi-tenant architectures for SaaS applications. A good starting position to the world of SaaS and Serverless.

SVS204-R | Builder Session | Write less code: Building applications with a serverless mindset [REPEAT]

This hands-on session explores patterns for using direct service integrations using Amazon API Gateway, AWS Step Functions, and Amazon EventBridge. Discover the efficiency of utilizing configuration to streamline development tasks, and push the heavy lifting to AWS. You must bring your laptop to participate.

SVS206 | Chalk Talk | Building an event sourcing system using AWS serverless technologies

In this chalk talk, explore strategies for building effective event sourcing architectures using AWS serverless technologies. Learn how event sourcing stores the application state as an append-only event log, preserving context and enabling traceability. Discover powerful benefits like auditing, fault tolerance, root cause analysis, and event-driven architectures across industries and applications. Learn how to distinguish event sourcing from patterns like event streaming and domain-driven design. Leave with practical insights into leveraging serverless for implementing event sourcing to gain audit visibility, fault tolerance, and visibility into your application state.

SVS205 | Workshop | Building a serverless web application for a theme park

In this workshop, learn how to build a complete serverless web application for a popular theme park called Innovator Island. You must bring your laptop to participate. ***Sounds like an intro workshop for people who are not experienced with Serverless. Also includes some Frontend work, which is a nice bonus.*

API203-R | Builder’s Session | Building common orchestrated workflows with AWS Step Functions [REPEAT]

Accelerate your data processing journey in this hands-on AWS Step Functions workshop. Build orchestrated data processing, async processing, and distributed transaction use cases. Leave with a deeper understanding of how to use AWS Step Functions to build scalable, efficient, cost-effective data processing architectures. You must bring your laptop to participate.

SVS209 | Breakout Session | Containers or serverless functions: A path for cloud-native success

In this session, explore the fundamental differences between containers and serverless functions. Investigate real-world scenarios to gain insights into choosing the right approach based on workload requirements, deployment scenarios, and operations. Choosing the wrong tool for the job is one of the most critical mistake an architect can make — I highly recommend this session.

SVS201-R | Workshop | Getting started with serverless patterns [REPEAT]

In this workshop, learn how to recognize and apply those patterns and best practices by building nearly production-ready code for a serverless application. Create microservices, run unit and integration tests, configure a CI/CD pipeline, and set up observability. You must bring your laptop to participate. I’m interested in knowing how close this will be to my Serverless blueprint.

API206-R | Chalk Talk | How event-driven architectures can go wrong and how to fix them

Attend this chalk talk to learn common event-driven pitfalls, including YOLO events, god events, observability soup, event loops, exposing monoliths, state corruption, and surprise bills. Explore strategies and techniques teams can implement to avoid these pitfalls and reap the full benefits of event-driven architectures.

SVS202-R | Chalk Talk | Thinking serverless [REPEAT]

Serverless is more than just AWS Lambda. It’s about learning to use a range of different services and techniques to solve a technical problem. How do you approach building a solution with a serverless mindset? In this chalk talk, learn how to tackle a business problem from a customer perspective by breaking down needs into serverless building blocks that work well together. I really like this approach. I discuss similar things on my reflecting on Serverless blog post.

Level 300

SVS306 | WorkShop Accelerate development with AWS Lambda Powertools for serverless APIs

In this workshop, start with an existing application built with Python and progressively improve your API event handler using Powertools for AWS Lambda. Learn how to implement request and response validation, dynamic routing, exception handling, middleware, and OpenAPI schema generation. Discover how to improve your API event handler with serverless best practices using Python that you can easily extend to other Powertools runtimes. You must bring your laptop to participate.

API306 | Breakout Session | Advanced patterns for distributed systems

Today’s applications are interconnected: they expose APIs, publish events, call third-party services, and externalize states. They must therefore address the fundamental challenges of distributed systems, such as out-of-order delivery, retries, idempotence, or partial failures. To balance those characteristics, architects have a range of options, including reducing the level of coupling through indirection, transformation, and asynchrony. In this session, learn about common design trade-offs for distributed systems and how to navigate them with design patterns, illustrated with real-world examples.

SVS312-R | Chalk Talk | AWS Lambda performance tuning: Best practices and guidance [REPEAT]

In this chalk talk, you learn about opportunities to optimize your serverless applications built with AWS Lambda, including optimizations in the function configuration and within your function code. This talk also covers how you can best measure and tune your function’s performance by configuring memory to get the right application performance. You also hear best practices for initialization logic and reuse to enable fast startup and fast function processing times.

API310 | Code Talk | Build a meeting summarization solution with generative AI & serverless

In this code talk, see live coding of a serverless application for producing meeting summaries with generative AI. Learn how to orchestrate transcription using Amazon Transcribe and summarization with Amazon Bedrock, orchestrated with AWS Step Functions. Discover how to simplify and scale your application using event-driven techniques with Amazon EventBridge. Leave with practical skills for developing serverless generative AI solutions that streamline meeting insights through automated transcription and summarization powered by AI/ML services.

SVS339 | Breakout Session | Building event-driven architectures using Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate

Event-driven architecture (EDA) enables organizations to build highly flexible and resilient systems, and customers are leveraging serverless containers to run EDA workloads due to its ease of use, scalability, and deep integrations with AWS serverless services. This session explores practical aspects of implementing EDA on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate, focusing on patterns for consuming events in containerized environments using AWS Step Functions, Amazon SQS, and Amazon EventBridge. Learn how to build scalable, fault-tolerant, and event-driven solutions that can adapt to changing business requirements.

DEV341 | Dev chat | From single to multitenant: Scaling a mission-critical serverless app

Both single-tenant and multitenant architectures come with advantages and drawbacks. While the single-tenant approach is often simpler to implement initially, it may fall short as your system scales. In this dev chat, explore how PostNL transitioned one of its mission-critical applications, EBE, from a single-tenant to a multitenant architecture, hearing about the challenges it faced, the strategies it employed, and the benefits it realized through this transformation, providing valuable insights for those considering a similar evolution for their applications.

SVS324 | Breakout Session | Implementing security best practices for serverless applications

Building with serverless enables organizations to build and deploy applications without managing underlying infrastructure. Serverless strengthens your overall security posture by reducing attack surface and shifting security operations to AWS. In this session, explore how to implement security best practices across the software delivery lifecycle and into production deployment. Hear lessons learned from working with numerous enterprise customers that can help your builders be productive and innovative within security guardrails.

SVS313 | Chalk talk | Is your serverless application ready for production?

Building secure, reliable, and performant applications while balancing cost and operations can be challenging. Getting this right by aligning to the AWS Well-Architected Framework can greatly increase your chance of success. In this chalk talk, specific best practice guidance is applied to a serverless reference architecture.

SVS320 | Breakout Session | Accelerate serverless deployments using Terraform with proven patterns

In this session, discover best practices and proven patterns for using Terraform to build serverless applications safely, predictably, and repeatedly. Learn techniques for designing modular, reusable architectures and strategies to test applications locally. Understand how to manage ownership and separation of concerns between operations and development teams. Gain insights into efficiently deploying serverless applications to the cloud. Familiarize yourself with open source frameworks to accelerate your serverless journey with Terraform today. Leave equipped with practical skills for leveraging Terraform’s power in your organization’s modern cloud architectures.

DEV339 | Dev chat | Supercharge Lambda functions with Powertools for AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda functions are crucial in cloud architectures but can be challenging due to potential failures and repetitive AWS-specific code. Powertools for AWS Lambda is a library that addresses these issues by enhancing observability, resiliency, and operational excellence in your Lambda functions. In this dev chat, explore the Powertools library’s capabilities and see how it can improve your Lambda functions by using it in a real-world application, helping you achieve a well-architected solution in AWS.

SVS319 | Breakout Session | Unlock the power of generative AI with AWS Serverless

Learn to harness the power of AWS Serverless to build robust, cost-effective generative AI applications in this breakout session. Explore using AWS Step Functions to orchestrate complex AI workflows seamlessly. Gain insights through real-world use cases and patterns covering prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, batch inferencing, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and more. Leave equipped with the knowledge and skills to unlock the true potential of secured, highly scalable, high-performance generative AI applications using serverless workflows. Elevate your AI capabilities in this rapidly evolving field.

Level 400

SVS404 | Workshop | Building serverless distributed data processing workloads

Enterprises today face an ever-increasing need to process large-scale data to meet their business goals and unlock new value. Distributed data processing offers a cost-efficient way to speed up processing, but it also presents challenges for developers in managing the parallelism within serverful environments. In this workshop, learn how serverless technologies like AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda can help you simplify management and scaling, offload undifferentiated tasks, and address the challenges of distributed data processing. Also, discover use cases, best practices, and resources that can help you accelerate your data processing journey. You must bring your laptop to participate.

OPN402 | Breakout | Gain expert-level knowledge about Powertools for AWS Lambda

Did you learn serverless best practices but are unsure about implementation? Have you used Powertools for AWS Lambda but felt you barely scratched the surface? This session dives deep into observability practices, resilient data pipelines with AWS Batch, safe retries with idempotency, mono- and multi-function APIs, and more. Learn about each practice in depth, achieve expert-level knowledge, and hear from maintainers about what’s next.

API401 | Chalk talk | Multi-tenant Amazon SQS queues: Mitigating noisy neighbors

This chalk talk explores advanced strategies for managing multi-tenant Amazon SQS queues, discusses the challenges posed by noisy neighbors, and shares effective mitigation techniques, including shuffle sharding and overflow queues. Gain insights into optimizing queue performance, ensuring fair resource allocation, and maintaining service quality across tenants. Walk through best practices for implementing these solutions, potential trade-offs, and examples of multi-tenant Amazon SQS architectures.

SVS406 | Chalk talk | Scale streaming workloads with AWS Lambda

In this chalk talk, learn how to optimize your streaming data processing with AWS Lambda. Explore scenarios where default processing speeds may bottleneck workloads consuming messages from Apache Kafka, Amazon DynamoDB, or other sources — especially when data enrichment is required. Learn how to implement parallel processing techniques for ordered and unordered use cases to address throughput limitations. See a live demo showcasing performance improvements in an example message processing pipeline. Leave this talk with practical strategies for achieving high-throughput, scalable streaming workloads on Lambda.

Heroes/Community Track

The community track consists of AWS Heroes’ and builder’s breakout sessions and dev chats. Hearing from proven community leaders who share their real production knowledge is an invaluable asset.

With over 30 sessions, I was unable to include them all here: you should search for sessions that start with ‘DEV.’ Search in the catalog for ‘DEV2’ for dev session 200 level, search ‘DEV3’ for dev session 300 level sessions, and ‘DEV4’ for dev session 400 level.

Non Serverless But Highly Recommended

SAS313 | Chalk Talk | Designing SaaS architectures that support global growth and scale

SaaS organizations are often driven by growth. Scaling to meet this growth often requires teams to think about how their underlying architecture, operations, and application can support these growth models. Designing a multi-tenant environment that can scale into new geographies, be deployed into more regions, and/or address additional compliance requirements can be challenging. This chalk talk examines the architectural challenges that come with supporting various growth/reach models, highlighting techniques, patterns, and strategies that are used to prime your SaaS offering for broader reach/expansion. It covers the architectural, deployment, resilience, and operational considerations that come with tackling this growth profile.

DEV335 | Breakout Session | The modern CI/CD toolbox: Strategies for consistency and reliability

As software delivery scales and environments become more diverse, maintaining consistency, security, and reliability in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) becomes increasingly challenging. Never fear! This fun, interactive session featuring AWS community and employee experts shows how to tackle the growing complexity by adopting best practices and modern techniques. Explore methods for ensuring consistent deployments across environments, robust configuration management, progressive delivery strategies, drift detection, and automated auditing with generative AI. Discover practical solutions to enhance reliability, safety, and efficiency, enabling faster delivery and reducing errors by treating all changes equally in the pipeline and streamlining processes across projects.

SAS406 | Breakout Session | Accelerating multitenant development with the SaaS Builder Toolkit

The SaaS Builder Toolkit (SBT) provides developers with a pre-built set of tools that decompose SaaS into a series of building blocks that can be used to create multitenant environments. This session digs into the moving parts of this toolkit, exploring the inner working of its core components, architecture, and extensibility model. It also looks at a real-world example of SBT in action, composing a working multitenant application from scratch. Additionally, it explores how SBT addresses core concepts, including building a control plane, onboarding tenants, authenticating tenants, supporting tiering, and provisioning tenant resources.

SAS305 | Breakout Session | SaaS architecture pitfalls: Lessons from the field

The last 7+ years spent helping companies build SaaS solutions has been eye-opening. AWS has gotten great insights into the dynamics, challenges, and pitfalls that teams often face when building SaaS solutions. In this session, explore a range of different patterns, including common technical and business themes that have impacted the scale, growth, and cost efficiency of SaaS offerings. This is about capturing these trends and outlining guidance that can help teams avoid falling into these same traps. Hear about the technical nuances, architecture challenges, and operational impacts that undermine the success of SaaS businesses.