Skip to main content

AWS Summit London 2026: And now for something a bit different.

Image
By

I always look forward to the AWS Summit. It’s a great opportunity to learn what AWS, and the engineers who use it, are up to, and to catch up with my colleagues. This year, though, turned out to be a bit different.

The first year I attended, I skipped the keynote entirely and spent the time in the AWS labs instead. Last year I did go to the keynote, and wished I hadn’t. This year I attempted to do both, but it didn’t really work. I managed just one very simple lab before I had to leave for the keynote. Although I did manage to get to the Red Hat stand early and be the first to get an actual red hat! Although I did have to carry it around all day and all the way back to Norwich that evening.

 
 
One of the main issues is the size of ExCeL. It’s big. Really big. You may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist, but that’s peanuts to ExCeL. It’s a long way from anywhere to anywhere else. Poor Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references aside, many things, including my local chemist, are closer to me at home than one end of ExCeL is to the other.
 

Keynote

The keynote was much improved this year. Mercifully, the contemporary dance was gone, replaced by a fantastic drummer who somehow vanished from the stage, drums and all,  the moment he finished. I suspect the slick videos helped disguise the departure.

Alison Kay, VP & Managing Director of AWS UK & Ireland, returned to deliver the opening address. Unfortunately, there was little improvement in her delivery. The good news, however, was a shift in messaging. Instead of last year’s “More POWER!” narrative, Alison spoke about AWS’s work with NVIDIA to improve silicon efficiency and reduce power consumption.

However, the really interesting stuff came from Francesca Vasquez, VP of Professional Services & Agentic AI. Alongside the introduction to the AWS DevOps Agent and AWS Security Agent, we heard about Amazon Quick, a set of agentic business agents that provide answers to your questions and help turn those insights into actions, and Kiro, an autonomous software development agent that turns natural‑language prompts into production‑ready code, designs, and documentation. Both sound like real game changers. Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any AWS labs for Kiro yet.

Next up was Ryan Cormack, Principal Engineer at Motorway, who explained how they use agentic AI to speed up software delivery without sacrificing engineering standards. He described how Kiro generates user stories, acceptance criteria, technical designs, and architecture diagrams upfront, giving engineers clear structure before coding begins. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO at Amazon, appeared at the end to present Ryan with a unique tshirt. I’m sure it was well deserved, but I wasn’t really sure why!

Finally we heard from Octopus Energy CEO, Greg Jackson. He was entertaining and engaging, even if his delivery wasn’t flawless. He told us how Octopus uses technology, data, and bold thinking to challenge incumbents and redesign the energy market around customers rather than assets. His message was that scale and innovation don’t come from playing safe, but from making big bets, embracing experimentation, and using modern platforms to move faster than traditional utilities ever could.

By the time Francesca was wrapping up, the keynote was already running 20 minutes late, so I rushed off to get in some more labs.

Customer Roundtable

Each year I’ve attended the AWS Summit, I've been invited to fill in the questionnaire to see if AWS wants to include me in a Customer Round table. This year was the first year they’ve wanted me!

The way it works is you have about 10 people around a table, plus two people from AWS, a camera and some microphones to create a transcription. There’s an online questionnaire which is filled in in stages and each stage is discussed in the group. The questions ranged from AI adoption to database migration, and are clearly to help AWS understand how they should be marketing their productions. 

What more could I want? I got to give my opinion for 90 minutes, had a free lunch and was given £115 in Amazon vouchers. 


I wrapped up the day by attempting a couple of Bedrock labs, neither of which quite worked as intended. One refused to generate the images it promised, while the other couldn’t access the model it had just walked me through creating. Still, that’s all part of the experience, you can’t win them all. Despite that, I’m already looking forward to next year’s Summit.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

AWS Summit London 2025

By
It felt good to be back at the AWS Summit . I got a lot out of last year and this year was interesting too. I attended some sessions on interesting topics and some which reassured me I’m doing the right things.  It was good to catch up with some old friends, see my colleagues in person and chat with some of our suppliers at their stands. For an event which boasts 24,000 attendees, most things run extremely smoothly. My only real gripes are not being able to get into some sessions as they were full and the length of time it takes to get a cuppa! Keynote I skipped the keynote last year as I was keen to get on with some hands on labs. This year I thought I’d find out what it was all about. It took place in the 4000 capacity auditorium, but that was full, so I watched in one of the many smaller theatres.  The theatres aren’t exactly small, each one holds more people than the entire nor(DEV):con conference in Norwich. Each is separated by only a curtain and headphones are provided...
Post a Comment
Read more