AWS re:invent 2018 – Day 1

Yesterday was my first day at AWS re:Invent conference. The venue is quite impressive, the conference is split between 6 hotels where you can attend different types of sessions including chalk talk, keynotes, hands-on labs or workshop. For my first day, I stayed in the same area in The Venetian to make it easy.

The walking distance is quite big between some places so it requires to carefully plan the day to be able to see what you want to see. Hopefully there is a shuttle service and I’ll move a bit more between hotels tomorrow. You also need to reserve your seat and be here in advance to be sure to enter the room.

In my own example, I wanted to attend a chalk talk about Oracle Licensing in the Cloud to start the week. As I was not able to reserve a seat I had to wait on the walk up line. The session was full, Oracle still interests lots of people and licensing is still a concern besides performance for lots of customers when they start planning to move to public cloud.

I’m working with AWS services for a bit more than 1 year at a customer but there are still a lot to learn and understand about AWS, that’s why I also attended to an Introductory session about VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) to better understand the network options when going to AWS. To make it simple, a VPC allows to to have a private network configured as you wish inside AWS. You have the control of the IP range you would like to use and you can configure the routing tables and so on.

I also tried to attend a workshop about running Oracle on the Amazon RDS, the AWS managed database service and especially how to migrate them from Oracle to the Amazon Aurora database using PostgreSQL compatibility. The goal was to use 2 AWS products to run the migration: AWS Schema Convertion Tool and AWS Database Migration Service. Unfortunately some issues with the WiFi constantly changing the IP and a limitation on my brand new AWS account that required additional checks from Amazon prevented me from going to the end of the workshop. But I got some credits to try it by myself a bit later so I’ll most probably try the Schema Conversion Tool.

Some DBA may worry about the managed database services or announces from Oracle about autonomous database but I agree with the slides below from AWS speaker during the workshop. I personally think that DBA won’t disappear. Data itself and applications will still be around for quite long time and the job may evolve and we will spend more time on application/data side than before.

Today is another day, let’s forget a bit about the DBA part and try to see more about DevOps…