Back in June, I had the pleasure of attending the AWS Summit London 2023, a one-day conference focused on educating participants about AWS products and services. 

The talks and sessions left me feeling motivated and eager to dive in and try out some of the services. Here's a short roundup of how I found it...

The standout theme that emerged throughout the conference was the rising prominence of AI and automation. 

The keynote speaker set the stage by emphasising the growing significance of generative AI. AWS has been working hard to improve their generative AI. They've enhanced the models, boosted security measures, and made it faster and more affordable for users.

The keynote featured examples of how AI can address real-world challenges. One notable talk was by Arup, a company that have leveraged machine learning and big data to reduce carbon emissions in cities by identifying and improving air pollution “red zones”. Witnessing the potential positive impact of AI on society was impressive.

Later in the day, I attended a session dedicated to Amazon CodeWhisperer. This tool functions similarly to GitHub Copilot, providing AI powered live code insights and suggestions. What sets CodeWhisperer apart is its knowledge of other AWS services, making it a very useful tool to use when working within the AWS environment. It is a sign of things to come that tools like this are reducing the number of things a developer would have to know to be able to get applications up and running.

Productivity tools are clearly a priority for AWS, as further highlighted by with a talk on AWS Step Functions. The session demonstrated how Step Functions can eliminate the need to write complex code to integrate AWS services together. Instead of having to write an application to orchestrate workflow steps, you can use Step Functions’ drag-and-drop interface to design an application in a flowchart type manner.

Following this talk, I managed to catch a demo using both CodeWhisperer and Step Functions to rapidly set up a new application in minutes. Personally, I’ve always found the world of AWS to be complicated and messy. These improvements give me hope that code automation will save us all significant amounts of time when setting up applications in future.

The AWS Summit shed light on the rising influence of AI and automation. Generative AI, serverless architectures and developer productivity tools took centre stage. We find ourselves in an interesting time where AI appears to be capable of offering limitless possibilities. 

Now, we must learn to embrace it and use it right, or risk being left behind by this transformative technology.