Looking back at a very successful Re:Invent ’24 for AWS News

Re:Invent is the ultimate week for The AWS News Feed. Many new features and services are released during the Las Vegas conference, and the cloud development world was ready to receive the flood of announcements. I’m proud to share how my platform helped thousands of professionals find, organize, and filter the news.

In this post we’ll go through the following topics:

Website visitors and email numbers
Usage of website features
Number of releases
Most popular articles
What’s next for AWS News

Website visitors and email numbers

The AWS News Feed has two primary channels: the website itself and the daily / weekly email digests. In the week from Sunday December 1st to Saturday December 7th, the website saw 10,600+ unique visitors racking up 37,300+ page views.

This is slightly more than the rest of the year:

An interesting note about this chart: two weeks before Re:invent the site already saw a significant spike in visitors. This was due to an massive wave of releases during the so-called Pre:Invent period. More on that later.

Next, let’s look at the number of email subscribers. Unsurprisingly, this statistic saw a major bump in the week before Re:Invent, adding about 200 users and pushing the number to over 1,100 people!

As a direct result, the platform sent more than 3,000 emails in a week, and for the first time crossed over 10,000 email deliveries in a month!

Website features

The AWS News Feed has quite a number of features to help people navigate the news. Among them are article summaries, related articles, popular articles, and auto-refresh. Let’s take a look how these features were used during Re:Invent.

Of course, the most common interaction was clicking an article and reading its summary. 2,8k out of 10,6k visitors used this function, for a total of 7,2k times. A slightly lower number of visitors (2,2k) opened an article after reading its summary. I call this a win for my website because it means the summary often either provided sufficient information or told the reader the article was not relevant enough to read.

The next interesting line is “Auto refresh enabled”. This feature will reload the latest articles every thirty seconds, providing a hands-off second screen to view the news on. Perfect to get the latest news as soon as it comes out, without interfering (too much) with your day job. I’m glad 552 (1,9%) of my users found this useful.

Another big win is the “Open article summary from [Summary]” line. This event is fired when a reader opens a related article. It tells me that 1,7% of my users have been able to find relevant further reading from my site.

Number of releases

Next, let’s take a look at the number of releases during the year, during Pre:Invent, and during Re:Invent itself. The following chart shows the daily releases over the past 6 months.

Here you can clearly see the increased number of releases two weeks before Re:Invent. In fact, when we zoom in to the past few weeks we can see AWS released significantly more features (194) during this Pre:Invent week than during Re:Invent itself (122).

If you’re interested what was released during these phases, I’ve got you covered! Here is a list of everything released during Pre:Invent. Here is a list of the best 23 Pre:Invent releases. Here is a list of everything released during the Re:Invent conference itself. And finally, here are the 23 top releases during Re:Invent 2024.

Then let’s look at the release pattern during the week.

I was very surprised to see a true flood of releases on Sunday, when the week had not officially even started yet. We saw almost no releases on Monday, except some minor news during Peter DeSantis’ Monday Night Live. Of course, Matt Garman’s keynote on Tuesday brought us S3 Queryable Metadata, S3 Iceberg Tables, and Aurora DSQL. And the Wednesday keynote by Swami Sivasubramanian brought us some SageMaker and Bedrock updates. The Werner Vogels keynote on Thursday did not introduce any new features or products (but was the best keynote by far, regardless).

Most popular articles

Before we close the article let’s take a look at the most popular news, as determined by visitor behavior. The top 10 articles on The AWS News Feed were:

(By the way, did you notice there are no Gen AI releases in this list? Just sayin’.)

What’s next for AWS News

So what happens now? First, a few months of taking it easy. I’ve been building The AWS News Feed for just over a year – the initial release was one week before Re:Invent 2023. I feel the platform has reached a certain maturity and has proven itself useful to many users. I’m sure it will be continue to be useful to many in its current form. I built, grew, and maintained the platform in my spare time – evenings and weekends – next to my full-time day job as a principal engineer at PostNL. This has taken a bit of a toll, and I’ll be happy to let the website coast for a while.

When I find the energy, I intend to add new features for AWS News. I’m thinking of alerts for releases matching a natural language query (“alert me when there is news about non-relational databases or object storage”), easily searching by author, keyword, or blog category, and maybe refresh the UI / UX.

In closing, I would like to thank all my sponsors of the past year. First and foremost Momento and Taimos, my earliest and longest sponsors. Without you, I would not have been able to have brought the platform to where it is now. Next, my other gold sponsors: Hotsock, Archera, Depot, and incident.io – and Freeman and Forrest for arranging the last three of those. My other silver sponsor: the AWS Security Digest. And last but not least: the individual sponsors who have given recurring or one-time donations. I see each one of you and I have nothing but love ❤️

If you have found The AWS Feed useful during, before, or after Re:Invent 2024, please consider a donation! Thanks, Luc