AWS re:Invent 2021: Our top session picks for telcos

The last—and best, IMO—of the year’s hyperscaler events, Amazon re:Invent, is also the first to host an in-person component since 2019. And they’re doing it in Las Vegas, baby! Where else to get back in the swing of things?

Attendance for the in-real-life gathering was super limited, so it’s already sold out (womp womp), but it’s never too late to watch all the sessions on demand. All the ones that matter for telcos, anyway. For that list, keep reading.

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AWS re:Invent: Our top session picks for telcos

Hopefully, the weeklong, in-person event November 29–December 3 is a harbinger of better days ahead, when we’ll all be able to gather for these things on the reg instead of staring at our screens in home offices around the world. If only Microsoft would get that metaverse up and running, amirite?

Do you need to watch these sessions? Totally! The hyperscalers save all their big announcements for these events each year, so this is where you’ll find out what’s new and what’s next. If you missed the other events, you can still see (and watch) my telco session picks for Google Cloud Next and Microsoft Ignite. And you can read my Google Cloud Next wrap and list of Microsoft Ignite takeaways.

We start with the industry-specific talks we think you should go to, then the sessions we recommend, grouped by topic. Get all the details and add them to your agenda on the On demand page, available after you register.

Telecommunications

Reinventing communications together

Here’s the telco pitch (part 1 of 2). Sounds like this session will cover all of the ways AWS can support communication service providers. You know, it’s all the stuff I’m always talking about: simplifying operations, improving customer experience, transforming for the future, finding new revenue streams, etc. Definitely make time for this one just to hear what AWS has to offer.

At the cutting edge: Multi-access edge computing with CSPs

And telco pitch part 2: Tune in to hear how Telenor, América Móvil and Boingo use AWS edge computing services. Funny, the catalog write-up for this one really focuses on transforming customer experiences. Does the AWS telco team subscribe to my newsletter? (Yes!)

Advertising and Marketing

Predictive audience scoring at scale with Amazon SageMaker

Put all that customer data you have to work! This session shares case studies of two companies using SageMaker, the AWS machine learning platform, to predict the behavior of large audiences. The featured companies are Acxiom, a data and identity solutions company, and AppsFlyer, a marketing analytics provider. I know Lebara uses SageMaker to detect fraud, building a ML model in days. This talk will likely get technical, as the catalog entry for this one says it’s for data scientists, data engineers, and technology executives.

Amazon.com

How Amazon migrated a large ecommerce platform to AWS Graviton

Peek under the Amazon.com hood in this session about how the company eats its own dogfood—or maybe we should call it pâté?—to power Prime Day, a massive shopping day on the platform. Not only does Graviton power Amazon.com, but DISH also plans to use the processors for its workloads in the world’s first AWS-powered 5G network. This session should be a fun one—the write-up says they’ll talk about the software updates the team had to do and the migration approach used to support the massive amount of traffic. It also cites 25–45% performance gains across 53,000 Amazon EC2 instances worldwide.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Use AutoML to create high-quality models

Once you get fired up about what machine learning can do with all your customer data (like reducing churn or eliminating fraud), this session will show you how AutoML can make it easier to build the custom solutions you need. The presentation will cover several of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) machine learning services and how they work together to make machine learning more accessible.

AWS Community

Building data lakes in highly regulated markets

Telco execs are always telling me that they can’t use the public cloud because of data privacy regulations. Nope. Wrong. Regulations are changing. The public cloud is building tools and safeguards to cover all the bases. This session will cover best practices for highly regulated markets. Go check this out to learn how even telcos can use the public cloud.

Business Apps

Embed scalable communication services into applications with AWS

Another one about customer love, this session will show you how AWS services can enable secure, scalable communications for multiple channels. Improvements in machine learning, artificial intelligence and streaming video are making all kinds of things possible. Attend this session to expand your horizons about serving your customers—as well as actively engaging them.

Improve agent performance with ML-powered Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect is a machine-learning-powered, cloud customer service contact center that helps you manage the people part of your customer service. This session will cover all the stuff it does (productivity, performance), including how to get set up quickly.

Compute

Powering next-gen Amazon EC2: Deep dive on the Nitro System

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, provides compute capacity in the cloud. AWS Nitro System is a set of building block technologies that’s powering the next generation of EC2. This session will be a deep dive into the Nitro System’s design and architecture. The tl;dr is faster innovation, enhanced security, better performance, lower price. If your engineers are going to be building for it, this should be a great intro.

Databases

Data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless, no-SQL, single-table database that provides high performance at any scale with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching. It also offers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale—which is why it’s a great fit for telcos (and Totogi’s charging engine!). This session will cover the fundamentals of DynamoDB and how to use it.

Amazon DynamoDB: Driving innovation at any scale

This session gets more into the aspects of DynamoDB that support scaling up or down based on your needs. And, you can hear directly from a DynamoDB customer: ecommerce company Mercado Libre. That story includes a migration of more than 5,000 Apache Cassandra databases to DynamoDB, and scaling up to support a huge customer surge during the pandemic. Should be interesting.

DevOps and Developer Productivity

Cloud-native private 5G and SD-WAN with Cisco and AWS (sponsored by Cisco)

In a sponsored session, Cisco will demonstrate how to transition your network services to the cloud with Cisco SD-WAN, Meraki, and cloud-native private 5G.

Internet of Things

Enhancing telecommunications CPE data collection & analytics with AWS

If you’re using customer-premises equipment (CPE) management systems to control fleets of CPE devices, this one’s for you. AWS can help you modernize those systems, improve data collection, add artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, and beef up your analytics. Learn how you can reduce costs and improve customer experiences in this session.

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