Attending re:Invent 2025 with the AWS All Builders Welcome Grant

I turned to my partner, said nothing and started playing Elvis Presley's Viva Las Vegas. Moment's pause, she laughed, "You got it!"

I never thought I'd be fortunate enough to attend AWS's biggest annual conferences: Philadelphia's re:Inforce (which has since retired) & sunny Las Vegas's re:Invent, let alone so early in my career. That was thanks to AWS's All Builder's Welcome Grant, a scholarship programme that fully sponsors IT professionals in the first 5 years of their IT careers by removing the financial investment required. The grant includes flights, accommodation, spending money, Uber credits, exclusive conference sessions and reserved seating to the keynotes. It is an opportunity that allows you to immerse yourself and network within a community of a rapidly developing technology. It is a brilliant opportunity to learn, network and be inspired through cloud technology development and the infinity of use cases shared by AWS and its partner and customer organisations.

For me, and partly the reason I've started this site (big up my first blog post!), my passion is to contribute knowledge with the wider IT community (currently guest lecture at Cardiff univerity and a keen lunch & learn speaker in my job). Cloud computing was the single, be it very large, area of IT that sparked my interest in pursuing a role in IT and Technology. It will continue to fascinate me given the unlimited breadth of use cases that we as professionals can support customers in utilising. The ABW is a sensationally awesome opportunity that gets you right in the mix of AWS's sharpest of cutting edge developments.

Applications for re:Invent 2026 are now open and can be applied via the AWS event page for re:Invent!

Plan, Plan, Plan...

If there was one common piece of advice from both the ABW and wider community, it is to PLAN, PLAN, PLAN, to make sure you get the most out of your experience. re:Invent is an extremely impressive, large-scale operation, running for 5 days, spread over multiple hotels along the Vegas strip (not to worry, there are frequent shuttle buses between them so you'll never have to wait long).

With 100's of chalk talks, seminars, lightening talks and hands-on labs, you want to make sure you have an agenda that focuses on what you're looking to get out of the conference. Whether you're attending as a grantee, representative of your organisation or as an individual, a significant investment has been made so make the most of it! The agenda is released well in advance and pubished as a catalogue which you can filter to tailor your experience. The main parameters I used to filter through were

1. Difficulty - Some areas of cloud I'm more familiar with than others. This filter helped me find the most appropriate level of session. If you're unsure, play some safe and try and push yourself on others!

2. Location - "I'm booked in for a 10am on LLM gateways in the Venetian, but I've given myself 10 mins to get over to the MGM Grand for a session on Securing AI Agents!". Try and stick to being realistic on getting between sessions. If you can, cluster consecutive sessions by location. Perhaps a morning in the Venetian and an afternoon in the MGM Grand

3. Technology/Cloud Service Type - Seems obvious but given the extensively hot topic of AI, you might find yourself biasly drawn to AI sessions. I found this filter really helpful to proportion my calendar across multiple technology and cloud service types so that I got the best, well-rounded experience I could

4. Session Type - How do you want to learn? re:Invent offers a variety of session types from your traditional hour-long lecture-style "Break-out" session, to interactive whiteboarding "Chalk-talk" sessions, to hands-on, smaller grouped "Builder" sessions, to quick-fire "Lightening talk" sessions from industry experts. I found a variety of these kept my experience engaging, fresh and fun!

Look out for sessions which are repeated over the 5 days. That was a huge help for my planning as it relieved initial clashes by a significant amount.

You might think time is an obvious one to include and it certainly is if you're looking for additional 'fillers' in your calendar. My advice is, don't worry about that when you're going through your first iteration of calendar building (I tried and realised I was losing visibility on a lot of great potentials!). Get them favourited first and then you can go through clashes in your second iteration. By this point you'll have a pretty polished plan ready to go!

All the chalk talks, break-out sessions and builder sessions require pre-booking before you attend. Make sure you do this as soon as possible as they will fill up quickly! Plans can change, mood can change in the moment of a busy conference - there were a few sessions I decided I did want to attend but didn't have a booking for. You can join the "Walk-up" queue which, 10 minutes prior to the session, they will allow in. I'd recommend getting there 25 minutes before the session as that queue can get very busy, eager and hoping. I've felt the heartbreak of being 1 or 2 short in the queue.

What did I learn?

With a diverse selection of session-types on offer like chalk talks which typically involve audience participation and architecture whiteboarding. Or breakout sessions which are more your traditional, lecture-style talks. Even hands-on labs that let you take advantage of spinning up AWS resources for fre, to put topics learned during sessions, into practice.

At re:Inforce, I attended a chalk talk on implementing responsible AI using LLM gateways. That was a hot topic last year as it considers organisations who are and will be adopting multiple external models within their enterprise, and enforcing security tooling like prompt engineering, guardrail implementation and continuous monitoring.

With the developments of Anthropic's trailblazing Model Context Protocol (MCP), it introduces new attack surfaces through vulnerabilities, like lack of observability and missing approval workflows. With that AWS have created an open-source implementation of an MCP Gateway and Registry to provide an entry point for all MCP servers and centralise authentication and control.

A session that had lasting impact on me was run by a couple of leading AWS Solution Architects on Data Architecture for Multicloud Environments. The first was a "Data Mesh" architecture, which implements a unified orchestration layer across multiple disparate data storage and analytics services spanning various cloud platforms, ultimately creating a self-serve data platform. Building on this foundation was the "Hybrid Materialisation" architecture pattern, designed to address challenges such as inconsistent query performance and stale data. In this pattern, each cloud environment acts as a source data system, augmented by a Change-Data-Capture layer for tracking real-time changes, a caching capability to reduce query costs and improve real-time data access, and a decision engine that drives the materialisation logic within the orchestration layer, intelligently determining how to retrieve data that is fast, fresh, and cost-efficient. The final pattern introduced was "Query Federation", which takes things a step further by decoupling storage from access through a virtualisation layer, and decentralising processing to minimise data movement via a unified interface, significantly improving query performance. What made this session particularly compelling was the sense that these patterns are not niche or theoretical, they felt applicable and recognisable across almost any customer sector, which felt highly valuable to be in the audience.

Getting SWAGgy

I can't write a blog on re:Invent without giving a special shout out to the mountain of SWAG on offer.

Make sure you keep space in your suitcase for SWAG. Personally, I'd take things I'd use like socks, notepads, jumpers and stickers, to build on an unhealthy obsession of filling my desk top with.

The only place you can run a 5k, watch augmented reality basketball and get a tattoo...

One reason you should keep slots free is to experience the impressively wide range of activities re:Invent have on offer before, during and after the conference event sessions and keynotes. One morning (rather early), they organised a 5k event that started at the Michelob ULTRA Arena in Mandalay Bay along Frank Sinatra drive (one road off South Las Vegas Boulevard - which I appreciate would have been a bit too ambitious to set the course on).

It was a great way to start a morning, rewarded by a medal and unbelievable breakfast burrito that will stay with me for years to come. If you're keen to sign up at re:Invent 2026, there's a booth directly opposite the main registration hall (in the Venetian) where you can get your race pack.

In the Sports Forum (located in Caesar's Forum), AWS showcased the 'NBA Play Finder XR' which allows you to step onto an empty basketball court, throw on a VR headset and watch iconic set plays through mixed reality. It uses a computer vision technique known as 'Human Mesh Recovery' that's powered through Amazon Sagemaker AI amongst other services (AWS blog post here). They let multiple people onto the court so happy to say that there was only a small amount of spatial heads-ups to those around me to avoid accidents.

You've been on a run, you've watched some iconic Lakers set pieces, why not round it off with a tattoo or piercing? Believe it or not, re:Invent has a studio if you want to leave the week with more than SWAG. I didn't on this occassion but I can definitely see a little cloud popping up on my arm somewhere.

You think it's all over, but then AWS casually host a festival to conclude the conference with bands, DJ's, unlimited food and drink and interactive games. They even had a demolition site where I watched cloud professionals and enthusasts alike, decompress after a long week of sessions by lifting and crashing cars. This definitely did not feature on my re:Invent bingo card.

How does that sound?

If you are in the first 5 years of your career, 21 or over and serious about using this experience to develop both yourself and the wider community, I'd highly recommend the ABW programme. The organisers are fantastic and they really look after you to help maximise your experience. If you're lucky enough to attend regularly, it is a brilliant experience and it's great fun. You will head home with a stash of new knowledge and an expanded network of peers. and SWAG of course.