Check out this guide to all the best stuff to do at the AWS conference this week

It’s that time of year again, when Las Vegas becomes ground zero for all things AWS (Amazon Web Services). Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, will grace the stage in his AWS re:Invent keynote and rain down #Vogelsisms: Shaking up markets, cannibalizing companies with new offerings, and causing Google and Microsoft to jump in response to cloud workload and storage pricing changes.

This week, 13,000+ lucky attendees will descend into Vegas for AWS re:Invent, the “World Series of Cloud,” all wanting to know what to expect next from AWS and how to have the best possible time at the conference.

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AWS re:Invent has now reached a massive scale. It includes 46.5 hours of organized activities, not including after-parties, has 350+ sponsors and over 270 sessions, and gives attendees three nights of non-stop networking and reveling opportunities.

We wanted to help attendees make the best use of their time, so we teamed up with more than 50 other event sponsors to create and curate the first-ever “Unofficial Crowdsourced AWS re:Invent Guide: Booth Swag, After-Parties and Key Sessions.”

Once we posted the guide on our blog, it quickly went viral. Judging by the hundreds of shared tweets and replies calling it the “CliffsNotes of re:Invent,” I think we’ve succeed in improving the attendee experience by making the most of their time in Vegas.

To make the guide even more useful, we’ve followed it up with the mobile Re:Invent Guide, a great smartphone wingman to the fun and madness of the show.

Here are a few examples of activities that should be in every attendee’s re:Invent game plan:

After-parties:

— Evident.io Superhero Pub Crawl
— Nike Silicon Forest After-Party
— And of course, the AWS re:Play Party always generates a guessing game as to who the musical act will be. (Last year, it was Dead Mau5).

Booths:

— Drones! CloudVelox will be giving one away.
— GoPros. You have a few chances to win one around the exhibit floor, including from Dome9 or Soasta.
— Orchestrate has a Pinoccio (pinnocc.io) board for one lucky visitor.
— Global Knowledge is offering a chance to leave with a voice-activated R2D2.
— Kindles, Headphones, Razor scooters, and of course unique T-shirts galore.

Sessions:

— Lightning Fast Deploys with Docker Containers and AWS: Guaranteed to be standing room only at this session by everyone’s current favorite cloud-child, Docker.
— CTO-to-CTO Fireside Chat Panel: Behind-the-scenes insight into how technology decisions get made at some of the most innovative cloud startups, including GitHub, Amazon, and PagerDuty.
— Opening Keynote: Amazon is always coy about what it’ll be announcing, and you can’t risk being the last to know. AWS will stream the keynote live for non-attendees so you can tweet the latest #Vogelsism. My personal favorite is, “Stop investing in undifferentiated heavy lifting,” which reminded businesses to focus on their company’s core products.

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“If you are awake during your time in Las Vegas; you’ll want to be learning, enjoying yourself, or — hopefully for the sake of AWS re:Invent — doing both at the same time.”

See everyone in Vegas!

Dave Ewart is Vice President of Marketing and Growth at Loggly.