re:Invent 2025: Treachery, Cunning, and Werner Vogels

Inside AWS, re:Invent starts sooner than you’d expect and you end up working on it for longer than you’ve planned. Through treachery and cunning, I avoided going for years. There was always someone else to pass my ticket to until 2024, when there wasn’t. After an extended professional breakup, which I initiated, Las Vegas and I were back together again. I swore the place off years ago after too many other tech conferences, but Vegas and its infinite hotel beds are inescapable.

The first year was easy. Put together an incredibly complicated S3 Access Grants workshop, delivered it twice and attended some customer meetings. Okay, the first part wasn’t easy and the result was a bit mad, but it worked. The thing about doing things that work is you’ll be rewarded with requests for more things that work. The result? re:invent 2025 started for me in August and ended about 15 seconds ago. I bit off just enough to chew this time around, at the cost of listening to various keynotes on my phone as I hoofed it between hotels.

Werner Vogels stepping back is not unexpected; he’s 67, after all, but I did make an “Awhhh!” sound audible enough to get a look from the other people waiting on the pavement to cross the street. It’s like a favourite item of AWS furniture is going into storage.

What about all the other service announcements? Well, I can tell you from first-hand experience that S3 Vectors is great. Anything else? Ask me when I get home. My opinions on everything I haven’t been working on won’t be fully formed until mid-January. It takes that long to really dig into the new stuff. But before that, I’m looking forward to spending my time with my Christmas tree and not VS Code or PowerPoint.