Screaming in the Cloud - The Return of re:Invent with Pete Cheslock

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

About PetePete is currently the Head of Growth And Community for AppMap, the open source dynamic runtime code analyzer. Pete also works with early stage startups, helping them navigate the complex world of early stage new product development.Pete also fully acknowledges his profile pic is slightly out of date, but has been too lazy to update it to reflect current hair growth trends.Links:AppMap: https://appmap.io/

Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. If you asked me to rank which cloud provider is the best developer experience, I'd be hard-pressed to choose a platform that isn't Google Cloud.

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to your Git provider and you're off to the races with service import, repo ownership, tech docs, and more. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and this is probably my favorite recurring episode slash tradition every year. I drag Pete Cheslock on, who talks with me about his experience at reInvent. Last year, Pete, you didn't go. The year before, none of us went because it was all virtual, but it feels like we're finally getting back

into the swing of things. How are you, Pete? I am doing great. It is always a pleasure. It was amazing to see other humans in person at an industry event. As weird as it sounds to say that it was great to be in Vegas, it was mostly great just because there were other humans there too that I wanted to see. Because this is going to confuse folks who haven't been following our various adventures, these days you are the head of growth and community at AppMap. But you and I have been talking for years,

and you did a stint working at the Duckbill Group here with us as a cloud economist. I miss those days. It was fun working with you and being able to bother you every day, as opposed to just on special occasions like this. Yeah, I know. I got to slide into your Slack DMs in addition. And then when I didn't get a response, I would slide into your Twitter DMs. It worked out perfectly. So yeah, it's been a wild ride. I mean, I took an interlude from my startup journey by continually working at tech startups. And yeah, I got to join on board the duck bill and have a really wonderful time cutting bills and diving into all of the amazing

parts of people's Amazon usage. But I'm also equally broken in my brain and continually said to myself, maybe I'll do another startup. Right. And it turns out that we're not a startup. Everyone likes to think we are. It's like, oh, okay. Amazon, for example, has us historically in their startup division as far as how they, the buckets that they put different accounts into. And if you look at us through that lens, it's, yeah, we're a specific kind of startup, specifically a failing startup or failed, because to us, growth is maybe we'll hire one or two people next year as opposed to, oh yeah, we're going to 10x this place. No, we're building a lifestyle business very much by design. I'd be very curious how many account

managers actually Duckbill has kind of churned through because usually you get to keep your account manager if you're growing at a pretty incredible clip. And it's kind of a bellwether for like, how fast are we growing so fast that we have kept our account manager for multiple years? Your timing is apt. We're a six-year-old company and I just met our fourth account manager last week.

No, honestly, what happens with AWS account managers is the only way you get to keep them is if your spend trajectory on AWS matches their career trajectory inside of AWS. Because if you outpace them, they'll give you to someone that they view as being more senior. Whereas if they outpace you, they're going to stop dealing with the small accounts and move on to the bigger ones. Honestly, at this point, I've mostly stopped dealing with my account managers. I had one that was just spectacular. It was sad to see him get promoted. Good for him. But I get tired of trying to explain the lunacy that is me to someone on the AWS side every year. It just, it doesn't make sense because my accounts are

super weird. And when they try and suggest the usual things that work for 99.995% of AWS customers and things they care about, it falls to custard when it comes to me specifically. And that's not on them. It's because I'm weird and broken. I'm remembering now that one of the best account managers that I ever worked with at a startup years and years ago, she was with us for a couple of years, pretty solidly. And then because careers are long and jobs are short, when I was at the Duckbill Group again doing work, turns out she was the account manager on this other thing, which looking at the company she was account manager for was like 500X my previous company.

So I was like, oh yeah, you're clearly moving up in the world because my company did not 500x. So sometimes you got to chase the ones who are. So let's talk about reInvent. This felt like the first reInvent post pandemic. And let's be clear, I wound up getting COVID by the end. So I don't recommend that to everyone. But let's be clear, this was not a re-event where anyone officially accepted that COVID existed. I was one of the only people wearing a mask to most of the events I was at. Great load of good that did me. But it was big. It was the usual 60 some odd thousand people that had been in previous years, as opposed to the hard

cap of 30 or so that they had last year. So it felt smaller and more accessible. Nope. Right back to bizarre numbers of people, but fewer sponsors than most years. So it felt like their budget was severely constrained and they were trying to have not as many sponsors, but still an overwhelming crush of attendees. It felt odd, but definitely very large scale. Yeah, I can echo that 100%. I'm sure we've talked about this in previous ones, but I've had the pleasure, well, some might call it not a pleasure, but it's been a pleasure to watch a reInvent grow over so many years. I went to the first reInvent, a company I was at actually sponsored it. And remembering back to that first reInvent, it was kind of quaint by comparison.

There were 4,000 people at the first reInvent, which again, it's a big conference, especially when a lot of the conferences I think I was really attending at the time were like 600, 1,000 maybe tops. To go to a 4,000 person event in Vegas, especially it's again in the same Expo Hall it's been since that first one, it still felt big. But every person stayed in Vegas, especially it's again in the same Expo Hall it's been since that first one

still felt big, but every person stayed in the Venetian. Pretty much everyone was in the same hotel, all the attendees that year, all the talks were there. There was, you know, a lot, I mean, a lot less of everything that was there. And so watching it grow over time, not only as a sponsor, because I've actually been kind of worked reInvent as a, like a booth person for many of these years for multiple different sponsors and had to coordinate that aspect of it. But then also a couple of times just being more like attendee, right? Just someone who could go and kind of consume the content. This year was more on the side of being more of an attendee where I got to just kind of experience the expo hall. You know, I actually spent a lot of time in the expo hall because a big part of

why I was there was to get t-shirts. Yeah. Well, it gets, I was running low on not only t-shirts, but socks. My socks were really worse for wear the last few years. I had to like re-up that, right? Yeah. And you look around, it's like, well, none of you people have like logoed pants. What's the deal here? Like I have to actually buy those myself. I don't, I'm not here to spend money. Yeah, I know. So, and so, yeah, this year it felt, it was like COVID wasn't a thing. It wasn't in anyone's mind. Just walking around Vegas in general, obviously is kind of in its own little bubble, but you know, I've been to other events this year that were much more controlled and had a lot more cautious attendees. And this was definitely not like that at all.

It felt very much like the last one I was at. The last one I was at was 2019, and it was a big, huge event with probably 50,000-plus people. And this one felt like, to me, at least attendee-wise, it definitely felt bigger than that one in a lot of ways. I think that when all said and done, it was a good event, but it wasn't necessarily what a lot of folks were expecting. What was your take on the content and how the week played out? Yeah, so I do in many ways kind of miss the event of yore that was a little bit more of a targeted focused event. And I understand it will never be that kind of event anymore.

Maybe they start splitting it off to be, you know, there's just felt much more like a builder event in previous years. The content in the keynotes, you know, the big keynotes and things like that would be far more these big, iterative improvements to the cloud. That's something that always felt

kind of amazing to see. I mean, for years and years, it was like, who's ready for another reinvent price drop, right? It was all about like, what's the next big price drop going to be? Was it though? Because I never was approaching

with an eye toward, oh, great, what are they going to cut prices on now? That feels like the least interesting things that ever came out of reInvent, at least for me. It's, what are they doing architecturally that lets me save money? Yes, or at least do something interesting architecturally. Great.

I didn't see Lambda when it first came out, for example, as a cost opportunity, although of course it became one. I saw it as, this is a neat capability that I'm looking forward to exploring. Yeah. And I think that's what was really cool about some of those early ones is these big, like big things would get released. Like Lambda was a big thing that got released. There was just these larger types of services coming out. And I think it's one of your quotes, right? Like, there's a service for everyone, but every service isn't for everyone.

Yeah. And I feel like, you know, again, years ago, looking back, it felt like more of the services were more geared towards the operational, the early adopters of Amazon. A lot of those services was for it, for those people. And it makes sense. They got to spread out further. They've got to have kind of a wider reach to grow into a lot of these different areas. And so when they come out with things that, yeah, to me, I'm like, this is a ridiculous feature. Who would ever use this? There's probably a dozen other people at different companies that are obscenely excited because they're at some enterprise that has been ignored for years. And now finally they're getting the exact tooling that they need, right? That made sense for a long time. I think that now the idea

that we're going to go and see an Andy Jassy era style feature drop of here's five new databases and a whole new compute platform and 17,000 more ways to run containers is not necessarily what is good for the platform, certainly not good for customers. I think that we're seeing an era of consolidation where, okay, you have all these services to do a thing. How do I pick which one to use? How do I get onto a golden path that I can also deviate from without having to rebuild everything? That's where customers seem to be. And it feels like AWS has been relatively slow to acknowledge or embrace that to me. Yeah. A lot of the services are services they're probably building for just their own internal purposes as well. I know they were for a while very motivated to get off anything Oracle-related. So they started building these services that would help migrate away from Oracle because they were trying to do it themselves.

But also, I talk with friends of mine who have worked at Amazon for many years, and I'm always fascinated by how excited they are still to be there because they're operating at a scale that just doesn't exist anywhere else, right? It's like they're off on their lone island that going to work somewhere else is almost going backwards because you've already solved problems at this lower level of scale. That's obviously not what you want to be doing anymore. And at the scale that they're at for some of these services, even like the core services, the small improvements they're making, they seem so simple and basic, like a tiny EBS improvement. You're like, oh, that's so boring. But at their level of scale for like something like an EBS, like one of those top five services, the impact of that tiny little change is probably even so amazingly impactful. Like it's just so huge, you know,

inside that scope of the business. That is just, that's what is, if you really start pulling the thread, you're like, wow, actually that is a massive improvement. It just doesn't feel that way because it's just, oh, it's just this tiny little thing. It's like just almost, it's too simple. It's too simple to be complex, except at massive scale.

Exactly. The big problem I ran into is, I should have noticed it last year, but it was Adam Solipski's first re-invent, and I didn't want to draw too many conclusions on it. But now we have enough dots to make a line, specifically two, where he is not going to do the Andy Jassy thing of getting on stage and reading off of a giant 200-item list of new feature and service announcements, which in AWS parlance are invariably the same thing. And they wind up rolling all of

that out. And me planning my content schedule for Requinvent around that was a mistake. I had to cancel a last minute rebuttal to his keynote because there was so little there of any substance that all it would have been would have been a half hour long personal attack. And I try not to do that. Yeah. The online discussion I feel like around the keynote was really like lackluster. It was, yeah, like you said, very devoid of value. It's not really the right word, but just substance and heft to it. And maybe, look, we were just blessed with many, many years of these dense, really, really dense, full keynotes that were, yeah, just massive feature drops where here's a thing and here's a thing. And it was almost that like Apple-esque style kind of keynote where it was

like, we're just going to bombard you with so many amazing things that kind of is in a cohesive storyline. I think that's the thing that they were always very good about in the past was having a cohesive story to tell about all of these crazy features, all of these features that they were just coming out with at this incredible velocity, they could weave the story around it. And you felt like, yeah, a keynote was whatever hour, two hours long, but it would go by. It always felt like it would go by quickly because they were just, they had it down kind of really tight messaging and kept your attention the whole way through because you were kind of like, well, what's next? There's always, there's more, there's gotta be more. And there would be right. There'd be that payoff. I'm glad that they recognized that what got them here won't get them there,

but I do wish that they were had done a better job of signaling that to us in more effective ways. Does that make any sense? Yeah, that's an interesting, kind of an interesting thought exercise. I mean, you kind of mentioned before, earlier, before we started recording, the CMO job is still available. It's still open at AWS. So if this was a good way to attract a top-tier CMO, I'd almost feel like if you were that person to come in and be like, hey, this did not work for here are the following reasons and here's what you need to do to improve it. You might have a pretty solid shot of landing that role. Yeah, I'm not trying to make people feel intentionally bad over it. The stuff is very hard, particularly at scale. The problem I had with his keynote was not, in fact, that he was a bad speaker. Far from it. He was good a year ago. He's clearly put work and energy into becoming better over the past year. From a technical analysis of how is Adam Salipsky as a public speaker, straight A's as far as I'm concerned. And I spend a lot of time

focusing on this stuff myself as a professional speaker myself. I have no problems with how he wound up delivering any of the content. My problem was with the content itself. It feels like he was let down by the content team. Yeah, it definitely felt not as dense or as rich as we had come to expect in previous years. I don't think it was that the content didn't exist. It's not like they didn't build just as much, if not way, way more than they have in previous years. It just seemed to just not be part of the talk. I don't know. I always kind of wonder too, is this just an audience thing, which is like, maybe I'm just not the audience for his talk,

right? Was there someone else in that expo hall, someone else watching the stream that was just kept on the edge of their seat hearing these stories? I don't know. I'm really kind of curious. Are we only representing this one slice of the pie, basically? I think part of the problem is that reInvent has grown so big that it doesn't know what it wants to be anymore. Is it a sales event by the size of the expo hall? Yeah, it kind of is. Is it a partner expo where they talk about how they're going to milk various companies? Possibly. There's certainly one of those going on. There was an analyst summit that I attended for a number of days during reInvent this year.

They have a whole separate thing for press. The community has always been a thriving component of reInvent, at least for me, and seeing those folks is always terrific. Is it supposed to be where they dump a whole bunch of features and roadmap information? Is it a time for them to wind up having executive meetings with their customers? It tries to be all of those things. And as a result, at this scale, it feels like it is failing to be any of them, at least in an effective, cohesive way. Yeah, and you really nailed each of the personas like of a re-invent attendee. I've talked to many people who are considering going to re-invent

and they're, ah, I don't really know if I want to go, but yeah, I really want to go to some sessions. I really want to do this. And I always have to kind of push back and say, look, if you're only going there to attend talks, like just don't bother, right? As everyone knows, the talks are all recorded. You can watch them later. I did have conversations with some engineer, principal engineer level software folks that

were there. And the prevailing consensus from chatting with those folks kind of anecdotally is that like they had actually a lot of struggles even getting into some of these sessions, which for anyone who's been to reInvent in the last, I don't know, four or five years, like it's is that they had actually a lot of struggles even getting into some of these sessions, which for anyone who's been to reInvent in the last, I don't know, four or five years, it's still a challenge, right? You've got to register for a lot of these talks way far in advance. There'll be a standby list.

There'll be a standby line. It's a lot of a lot. And so there's not usually a ton of value there. And so I always try to say, if you're going to reInvent, your kind of main purpose to go would be more for networking or just you're going because of the human interaction that you hope to get out of it. The high bandwidth conversations that are really hard to do in other areas. And I think you nailed a bunch of those.

An analyst briefing is really efficient if you can get all the analysts in a room versus doing one-off analyst meetings, meeting with big enterprises and hearing their thoughts and feelings and needs and requirements. You can get a lot of those conversations. And especially too, if like talking to an enterprise and they got a dozen people all spread over the world, well, you can get them all in one room. Like that's, that's pretty amazing in this world. And then on the sales side, I feel like granted, I spent most of my time in the expo hall, but that was probably the area that I think you said earlier, which I really picked up on, which was the balance between sponsors and attendees felt out of whack. Like it felt like there were way more attendees than the sponsors that I would have expected to

see. Now, there were a lot of sponsors on that expo hall, and it took days. I mean, I was on the expo hall for days walking around and chatting with different companies and people. But one of the things that I saw that I have never seen before was a number of sponsorship booths, right? And these are booths that are like pre-built 10 by 10 foot size or the smaller ones that were blanks. They were like, you know, like, like in a low quality car where you have blank buttons that like, if you, if you paid more, you'd get that feature. You walking around, there was a non-zero number of just straight up empty booth, blank booths around, which I don't know, like that felt kind of telling. Like, did they not sell all their sponsorships? Has that ever happened? I don't even know.

But this was, I felt like the first time- Boarded companies buy the sponsorship and then realize that it was so expensive to go on top of it, throwing bad money after good might not have made sense. Because again, when people bought out these sponsorships, in many cases, it was in the very early days of the growing recession we've seen now. And they may have been more optimistic. Their circumstances may certainly have changed. I do know that pricing for reInvent sponsorships was lower this past year than it had been in previous years. In 2019, for example, they had two expo halls, one at the Aria Quad and the other at the Venetian. They had just one this

year, which made less running around on my part, but still. Yeah, I do remember that, that they had so many sponsors. What I would say about the sponsors that there's two parts of this that were actually interesting. One, you're definitely right. As someone who has sponsored reInvent before and has had to navigate that world, you are likely going to commit to the sponsorship as early as June. Could even be earlier than June, depending on how big of a thing that you're doing. But it's early. It's usually in the summertime that you're... If you haven't made a decision by the summertime, you could actually not get a booth. And this And this was, I remember the last one that I'd sponsored was maybe 2018, 2019. And like, you don't want those last few booths. Like they put

you in the back and not a good way, but going there, there were a lot of, I did notice a lot of booths that had had pretty massive layoffs who still had the booths, you know, and again, large booths, large companies, which again, large booths, large companies, which again, same thing. I kind of am like, wow, like how many employees did that booth cost you? Right. Cause some of these booths are hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor. And then the other thing that I actually noticed too, which I was honestly a little surprised by, with the exception of the Datadog booth, I love my friends at Datadog. They have the most amazingly aggressive booth BDRs who are always just, they'll get you if you're like hovering

near them. And there's always someone to talk to over there. Like they staff it really, really well. But there were some other booths that I was actually really interested in talking to some of the people to learn about their technology that I actually waited to talk to someone. Like I waited for someone to talk to. And then finally I'm like, you know what? I'm going to come back. And then I came back and waited again. So it's like how many of these sponsors obviously spent a lot of money to go there.

Then months later, they start looking at the people that they have to support this. They've already had some layoffs and probably sent a much smaller audience there to actually like operate the booth. This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool

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and I always enjoy, though I'm not certain how actionable it is in a direct sense, was Peter DeSantis' Monday Night Live keynote. It was great. I mean, the one criticism I had of it on Twitter at the time, before that thing melted and exploded, was that it was a bit mislabeled, because it really should have been what it turned into midway through of surprise computer science lecture with Professor DeSantis. And I was totally there for it, but it was fun just watching some of the deep magic that makes this all work be presented in a way

that most of us normally don't get to see. Well, this was the first year they did not do their midnight madness over the top kind of thing. And I also, I don't recall that I saw them doing one of the other things i feel like is that night is there like giant wing eating competition am i wrong did they do that this year and i just missed hearing about it they did not turns out that competitive

gluttony is not as compelling as it once was but they also canceled their midnight madness event a month or two before reinvent itself what was super weird to me was that there was no event, community or otherwise, that sprung forth to seize that mantle. So you had a whole bunch of people who were used to going for several hours that night to a big event with nothing to do. And at 9 p.m., they started just dumping a whole bunch of service releases in their blog and RSS feeds and the rest. And it just felt very weird and discordant. Like, do they think that we have nothing better to do than sit here and read through this on a Sunday night where we would have otherwise been at a party? Well, yeah, in my case, I'm super sad. And of course I had nothing better to do that night, but most people that, that thing's going on. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think also if you, maybe it's a little bit better now,

but I don't know when you have to buy that many chicken wings in advance, but with supply chains being what they are and the cost of chicken wings, I mean, not that I track the cost of chicken wings, except I absolutely do every time I go to Costco, they're up substantially. So that was probably a contributing factor

to the wing eating contest with supply chain pain and suffering. But yeah, it's really interesting that just even in what some of the sponsors kind of were doing this year over previous years, I doubt they did this in 2021, but maybe I don't know, but definitely not in 2019. Something that I don't recall to this level was the sponsors essentially booking out entire restaurants near the venue every single day of the conference. And so again, if you were at this event like we were, and you at the end of the thing were just like, I just want to sit and I've got a handful of friends i just want to sit and i've you know got a handful of friends i want to sit and like have a drink and just like chat and catch up and hear how the day went and everything else finding a place to actually go to do that was very very hard to do and the thing that i noticed

was again seemed like it was new this year i don't recall it in 2019 to this level is there were a lot of the big sponsors that had just booked a whole restaurant, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like from open to close, fully booked it, which was honestly brilliant. Oh yeah. If you bring 200, 300 people to an event, you've got to feed them somehow. And Hey, can we just rent out your restaurant for the entirety of this week is not out of the question compared to what you'd even spend just reimbursing that sea of people to go and eat somewhere else.

Exactly. The reason I'm approaching this from like a business perspective, if I had a large group of enterprise salespeople and they needed a place to book meetings, well, it's super compelling if I'm being courted by one of these salespeople and they're like, hey, come and have breakfast, come and grab a coffee. And there's a place where

you can sit down and quietly enjoy that meal or coffee while having a sale. I'll have that sales conversation and I'm going to be way more motivated to show up to it because you're telling me it's like, this is where we're going to meet versus some of my friends were trying to like coordinate a lunch or a coffee. And it's like, do we want to go to the Starbucks that has 500 people in line? Or do we want to walk four hotels, you know, down the street to find a bar

that has video poker that no one will be sitting at and that we can just sit down and talk, right? It kind of felt like those were your two options. One thing that MongoDB did is rented out the sugar cane restaurant. And they did this a couple of years in a row and they wound up effectively making it available to community leaders, heroes and whatnot for meetings or just a place to sit down and catch your breath. And I think that was a brilliant approach. You've gone to the trouble of setting this thing up for meetings for your execs and whatnot. Why not broaden it out?

You can't necessarily do it for everyone for obvious reasons. But it was nice to just reach out to folks in your orbit and say, yeah, this is something available to you. I thought that was genius. And I wish I thought of doing something like that. Let's be clear. I also wish I had rent out sugar cane for a week budget. But, you know, we take what we can get. Yeah. That'll be a slight increase to the budget to support that move. Just the scoche. Yeah. Yeah. The, the Mongo DB, they were one that

I do remember had done it similarly. I don't know if they had done it kind of full-time before, but a friend of mine worked there had invited me over and said, Hey, like, come by let's grab a drink. You know, we've got this hotel, you know, this restaurant kind of booked out. And that was back in 2019, really enjoyed it. And yeah, I noticed it was like, you know, basically they had this area available, again, a place to sit down, to open your laptop, to respond to some emails, making it available to community people should have been a no brainer to really all of these other sponsors that may have times of less kind of attendance, right? So obviously at any of the big meals, maybe that's when you can't make it available for all the people you want to, but there's going to be off hours in between times that making that available and offering that up

generates a supreme amount of goodwill, you know, in the community because, you know, you're just looking for a place to sit down and drink some water. Yeah, that was one challenge that I saw across the board. There were very few places to just sit and work on something. And I'm not talking a lounge everywhere around every corner was needed, necessary, or even advisable. No, the problem I've got was that I just wanted to sit down for two or three minutes and just type up an email quickly or a tweet or something. And nope, you're walking and moving the whole time. Yeah, honestly, this was a big missed opportunity for the Amazon event planning folks. There was a lot of unnecessary space usage that I understand why they had it. Here's an area

you could play four square. Here's an area that you could, they had seesaws that you could sit on, like just, I don't know, kitschy stuff like that. And it was kind of off to the side or whatever. Those areas, honestly, like we're kind of off to the side. They were a little bit quieter, would have been a great spot to just like load up some chairs and couches and little coffee tables and just having places that people could sit down because what ended up happening, and I'm sure you saw it just like I did, is that any hallway that had somewhere you could lean your back against had a line of people just sitting there on their laptops. Because again, a lot of us are at this event, but we also have jobs that we're working at too.

And at some point during the day, you need to check in, you need to check some stuff out. It felt like a lack of that kind of casual space that you could just relax in. And when you add on top of all the restaurants nearby being essentially fully booked, it really, really leaves you hanging for any sort of area to sit and relax and just check a thing or talk to a person or anything like that.

Yeah, I can't wait to see what lessons get learned from this and how it winds up mapping to next year across the board. Like I have a laundry list of things that I'm going to do differently at reInvent next year. I do every year. And sometimes it works out, sometimes it really doesn't. And it's a constant process of improvement. I mean, one of the key breakthroughs for me was when I finally internalized the idea that, yeah, this isn't going to be like most jobs where I get fired in the next six months,

where when I'm planning to go to reInvent, this is not the last reInvent I will be at in my current capacity doing what I do professionally. And that was no small thing where, oh yeah, so I'm already making plans, not just for next re-invent, but laying the groundwork for the re-invent after that. Yeah, I mean, it's a smart way to do it.

And especially too, when you don't consider yourself an analyst, even though you obviously are an analyst, maybe you do consider yourself an analyst, but you're more, you know, you're also the analyst who will go and actually use the product and start being like, why does this work the way it does? But you're kind of a little bit the reinvent target audience in a lot of ways, right? You're kind of equal parts on the analyst, expert, and user as well. It's like you kind of touch in a bunch of those areas. But yeah, I mean, I would say the one part that I definitely enjoyed was the nature walk that you did and just seeing the amount of people that also enjoyed that and came by. It was kind of surreal

to watch you in like full safari garb, basically meandering through the expo hall with this like trail of like backpacks following you around. It was a lot of fun. And, you know, it's like stuff like that where people are looking for interesting takes on the kind of the state of something that is its own organism. Like the expo hall is kind of its own thing that is outside of the reinvent control. It's kind of whatever is made up by the people who are actually sponsoring it. Yeah, it was neat to see it play out. I'm curious to see how it winds up

continuing to evolve in future years. Like right now, that nature walk is a blast, but it was basically at the top end. I had something like 50 people following me around at one point, and that is too big for the expo hall. And I'm not there to cause a problem for AWS. Truly, I'm not.

So I need to find ways to embrace that in ways that don't kill the mojo or the energy, but also don't create problems for, you know, the company who's back up. I am perched upon yelling more or less ridiculous things. I think it was particularly interesting how many people I'd be walking by and every once in a while I would see like a friend of mine,

someone actually working one of the booths and just be like, what's going on here? Like one of my friends even said, yeah, like nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. And you can almost see more people just connecting themselves onto this safari train, moving their way through. Yeah, it's a sight to see, that's for sure. On this aspect of this, again, nothing can ever stay the same on some level. You've got to wind up continuing to evolve and grow, or you wind up more or less

just frozen in place and nothing great ever happens for you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and again, the expo hall has gone through these different iterations and I, you know, when it does come to the event, as I kind of think back, I probably have spent most of my time actually in the expo hall, usually just related to the fact that like when you're a sponsor, like you're just, that's where you're at for better or worse, you're going to be in there. And especially if you're a sponsor, you want to check out what other sponsors are doing because you want to get ideas around things that you might want to try in later years. I mentioned Datadog before because Datadog, to this day, continues to have the best design booth

ever. When it comes to a product that is highly demoable, I've been, myself as a sponsor, has always been a struggle to have a very effective demo setup. And I actually remember kind of recommending to a startup that I was at years ago on doing a demo setup that was very, very similar to how Datadog did it because it was brilliant where you have this like octagon around a main area of tables and having double-sided demo stations. A lot more people are doing this now. But again, as I walked by, I was again reminded

just how effective that setup is because not only do you have people that just, they don't want to talk. They just want to look and they can kind of safely stand there and look. But you also have enough people staffing the booth for conversations that for like me, who actually might want to ask real questions, I don't have to wait and I can get an answer and be taken care of right away versus some other booths. This year, one of the areas that I

actually really enjoyed, and I don't even know the details of like how it all came about, but it looked like some sort of like builders expo. I don't know if the details of how it all came about, but it looked like some sort of builder's expo. I don't know if you remember walking by there, but there was a whole area of different people who had these little IoT or various powered things. One of them was like a marble sorting thing that was set up with a bunch of AWS services. I think there was like the simple beer service V4 or V5

at this point had one of those iterations. And it was some sort of mixture between Amazon software services that were powering these like physical things that you can interact with. But what was interesting is like, I have no idea like how it was set up and who, I'm assuming it was Amazon specific, but each of these little booths were like chalked up with information about who they were and what they built, which gave it a feel of like this was like a last minute builder event thing. It didn't feel like it was a highly produced thing. It had a much more casual feel to it, which honestly got me more interested to spend time there and check out the different booths. It was really nice to be able to go and I feel like you got to see all of the booths and whatnot.

I know in previous years, it feels like you go looking for specific companies and you never find them. And you thought, oh, they must not have been here. And you find out for the fact, oh, no, just you were looking in the wrong direction because there's just so much to see. There were definitely still a couple of those. I had a list of a handful of booths I wanted to stop by either to say hi to someone I knew who was going to be there or just to chat with them in general. And there was a couple that I had to do a couple of loops to really track them down. But yeah, I mean, it didn't feel as overly huge as a previous one or as previous ones. And I don't know, maybe it was like the way they designed it. The layout was maybe a little bit more efficient so that you could do loops through like an outer loop and

inner loop and actually see everything. Or if it just was, they just didn't have enough sponsors to truly fill it out. And maybe that's why it felt like it was a little bit more approachable. I mean, it was still massive. I mean, it was still completely over the top and loud and shiny lights and flashing things and millions of people. But it is kind of funny that like, if you do enough of these, you can start to say, oh, well, I don't know. It still felt a little bit less for some reason. Yeah. Just a smidgen. Yeah. Pete, it is always a pleasure to get your take on reInvent and see

what you saw that I didn't and vice versa. Same time next year, same place? Yeah. I mean, like I said, one of my favorite parts of reInvent is, you know, we always try to schedule like an end of event breakfast when we're both just supremely exhausted. Most of us don't even have a voice by the end, but just being able to like catch up and do our quick little recap.

And then obviously to be able to get on a podcast and talk about it is always a lot of fun. And yeah, thanks again for having me. This is, it's always, it's always a blast. It really is. Pete Cheslock, head of growth and community at AppMap. I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, and then put something insulting about me in the next keynote, because you probably work on that

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