AWS Summit New York
2022

Dr. Werner Vogels was booked to open AWS Summit New York 2022, and he had Covid. We had been talking through the backup plan. There were others who might have spoken, but our actual backup speaker was too far away to fly in. Fifteen minutes before the keynote, Werner came up to me, gave me a fist bump and said: “You’re up.” InformationWeek reported it the next day: “It was an unexpected day at the Javits Center.”

I knew the keynote. I had prepared it a month earlier, and I had been in rehearsals the night before. But knowing a keynote is one thing and being ready to give it is another, so I spent those fifteen minutes in the make-up chair running through it, with Nick Walsh beside me holding a laptop with the slides on it.

It covered how far AWS's infrastructure had come, from 84 Availability Zones in 26 Regions to almost 16 gigawatts of renewable energy across 19 countries, and announced the general availability of Amazon Redshift Serverless and AWS Cloud WAN. Liz Fong-Jones told Honeycomb's story of moving to AWS Graviton, and Elliott Cordo told Capsule's of using data and machine learning to improve the pharmacy.

In the last half hour, protesters interrupted several times. Each time I stopped until they had been led out, then picked up where I had left off.

Afterwards Corey Quinn wrote on Twitter: “As @werner would say, Now Go Build(tm). @thebeebs inadvertently conducted a masterclass in how to give a dynamite engaging keynote to many thousands of people. I hope and expect to see him on the keynote stage again soon.”

That day is why, now that I lead keynotes, I prefer backup speakers to be local to the city we are presenting in. A backup who has to fly in is usually only there if the problem shows up the night before. When it shows up on the morning, they are too far away to help.