the new AWS getting started experience

from strands and then this new thing with Aurora and data anywhere. So pretty cool, interesting things to talk about in the future. Yeah, pretty exciting. And again, for those joining, we'll get started for real around 10, but we wanted to make sure that we could click all the buttons correctly and also get the right people speaking and everybody's mics working and things like that. So apologies for not starting the conversation yet. Where else have you been in the world recently, Darko? And David, you were also traveling a lot recently as well. Yes, I made it to the magnificent metropolis of Seattle and then got to spend a little over a week in Buenos Aires. And so Argentina was a lot of fun. I hear Seattle is very nice. You wouldn't know because you haven't been in a while, right? I haven't been there. I just get it back so I hope it's nice. But I'm so you were at the nerd there. What's the name of the conference you went to? Was it the... You never know how to... Oh, that one. Yes. Okay. Yeah, Nadeira. And it's an amazing conference. So it is really heavily community driven. There's so much excitement around it. And frankly, so many people. Like it shocks me how big Nadeira is because it is... It's really this community conference. It moves around every year. They have multiple versions of it across countries in Latin America. But like the conference itself is just such a huge... a huge chunk of community coming together around technology. And so many things going on around it. I haven't experienced anything close to it. The closest thing I have though is maybe Fostim, which is in Brussels every year. But frankly, this had a lot more energy and I think more people. I like it. I like it. Yeah, I've been traveling a little bit as well. So I actually got to spend some time in Brazil doing a bunch of AWS community stuff, which was incredibly fun. Then I got to do Canada. We did a whole road trip in Canada with the AWS communities and students. That was incredibly fun. And lastly, I was in India as well. So it's fascinating to see how students are excited to talk about technology. In this special new world of AI and whatnot, it's a little bit unknown to a lot of people. But it's great to see the folks out there just being excited and wanting to learn more and how, what are the right choices they make and stuff. So yeah, but okay, so we should be getting new folks coming in soon. I think we're going to kick it off now at 10-ish. So yeah, it's 10. It's 10, yes. And John, I know that we're chatting, but I think you would invite to speak. So hopefully if you accept that, you can come up to you. But I'm so excited. This week we were able to ship a new Getting Started experience for AWS. And I have a lot of the product and engineering leaders from the team that was working on that project here. So I would love to first do around introductions so that you can start hearing who to ask certain questions to and who you're hearing from. So Karen, can you start with introducing yourself and your role on the team? Sure. I'm Karen Habercorn. I have been at AWS for a very, very long time. And most of that time I have worked on AWS identity and security. But for the past nine months or so, I've been really focused on early stage developers, people who are getting started and how we can get all of the configuration questions out of the way so people can build more quickly. I love that. I love that. David. Hi, my name is David Nally. I lead developer experience at AWS. And basically my team's mission in life is to turn developers into rating fans of AWS. And a lot of what we do is we chase paper cuts. We try and help do some education around how to build with AWS. We work with a lot of teams like Karen's team on making sure that the experience is really delightful and highlighting all of the problems that we think customers will find. So in many ways we serve as customer zero for a lot of the things that AWS puts out. And so it's been really exciting to work with Karen and John and some of the other folks from that team as we tackled the onboarding and zero to first-joy journey. Cool. And David, you just mentioned John. So John, let's see if your mic works. We'd love to hear your intro. Hi, my name is John Dunnigan. I'm a senior principal engineer at AWS. I've actually worked at AWS now for 14 and a half years. And I've gotten to do all kinds of fun things. One of the things that the thing I got to do most recently is work on this new AWS experience. So I'm excited to talk about it today. Cool. And Darga? Hi, I have the opportunity to work with folks like yourself, Ali and David and this team. And as a developer advocate, I hopefully get to advocate on your behalf and making it a bit better. So word of note to all of you listening in. If you see a problem with AWS, please feel free to yell at me on the internet or any of these wonderful folks here. And we're going to try to make it better. I love that. And that's so true. I feel like so much of what this new AWS getting started experience came from was exactly that. The feedback from people like the folks on this space right now telling us, hey, this is something that could be better. This would make it so that I can get started on AWS easier or feel more comfortable building. So really excited about that. But anybody want to talk a little bit more about the vision for the new experience and why we built it? Yeah, so I'll start and Karen probably has a clearer vision of this. But I'll start with the frustration. And a lot of the frustration was that if you were new to AWS, it meant that you didn't know all of the ins and outs. And you had a huge learning curve in front of you. And so there's just a ton of friction before you can do anything useful. And some of that friction was maybe we demand things like credit cards up front. Are we demand that you create a brand new account that's going to be separate from everything else? And but you know, it doesn't stop there. It gets worse in my opinion because then you have to learn things like I am. And I love I am like sincerely. I think I am as amazing for what it does. But also when you're learning, it frankly gets in the way a lot. And so a lot of the a lot of the I hate to say this is frustration driven development. But a lot of this was just looking at the process. And so my team and actually these are actually fits on Alice team. You know, we did things like we would hire someone fresh out of college who studied computer science. They clearly had some interest in the field. And we would go ask them to, you know, build a web app. And you know, they would produce scores of pages of documentation of friction. And we asked a couple of questions. And one of those was, if you were not being paid to do this, where would you stop? And there were a lot of those, I will call them break points, where people would have jumped out of the process if they had had, if they've not been getting paid to it. And so like we took that as a as an interesting starting point. And I actually remember, we went to a distinguished engineer and a VP. And we just set them down in front of this brand new entry level employee who had been told to go build a web app and just let them ask questions. And it was a fascinating experience when we started talking about all of the friction that came from trying to figure out IEM roles, for instance. And so like that experience and the kind of the deafening, the confony of feedback that we were getting really stood up and stood out for places that we needed to chase. And so like that's the genesis from my perspective. I'm sure Karen has a vastly different experience though. I don't think so David, but I will build on what you said a little bit, which is that in all the years that AWS has been a company even, we've gradually built up to serve some of the largest companies and governments in the world. And I personally have been involved in building a bunch of features where I talk to an extremely large company or an extremely large government agency that was seeking to have very specific controls over their identities, over their access, over their security policies. And as you can tell, these are all companies that are really far in their journey of building out IT infrastructure and thinking about the governance that they want. And I think what happened when we were working with your team, David, is realizing that those features are super valuable to those companies, but they get in the way of new people if you present everybody the same experience. Because new people don't need all those decisions early on in there when they're just trying to get that web at built, like the the employee that you were talking about. Like, why would you be making decisions about what access controls you're going to have for future team members who you don't even exist yet right now, you're just building the app on your own, or maybe you and one buddy are building the app. And for a very long time, I think we thought that we could present the complexity of AWS to everyone and everyone would get value from it. And as we started working more with developers who were at earlier stage, we realized, and honestly, thus be fair, y'all been giving us this feedback for a long time. But I think we maybe were hoping we could provide the same experience to every all customers and they would have it would be the right experience for everyone. And it's just not, like the right experience for a very large customer is to have a lot of configurability for all their very detailed use cases. The right experience for someone who's starting off and just building their first app is the opposite of that. And that's why I'm so excited to have been working on this, because we looked at each of the decisions we put in front of, put in front of customers and ask who needs this decision and also when do they need it, when in their journey do they need it. And if you don't need it until later, let's make that decision later, like let's not make all the decisions upfront. You know, somebody on this on this column might be the one who's going to have the next unicorn startup and we'll eventually get to the point where you want to make very fine-grained governance decisions about your environment. Good for you. Even you are not do not need those controls early on in your experience. So we asked ourselves like what are sensible defaults we could give people who are starting out so that they don't make a bunch of decisions upfront, but they're building in a way that would support their growth so that no matter how big you grow, the environment you started out with is there to grow with you. And I'm happy to talk more about some of the detailed decisions, but I do really appreciate the partnership with your team, David, and Allie because you really brought some of the developers to the table who could give us that feedback really directly and tell us what had to be true if you were earlier in your stage to get over that initial hump. One of the features I'm most excited about is not the one I'm prepared to talk about, so maybe we'll see someone else. It's spend limits. The thing I kept reading about was I'm just worried that I'm going to hit that surprise bill. I mean, that was like for the longest time here. Okay, I've been here for 11 years and I started off in premium support. And even back then, the instructions was, and I was a pure believer of this, trust me, and I was like, for the longest time, I thought spend limits were the wrong thing because it's a little bit new ones, but you shouldn't stop the thing that's making you money, right? That's kind of my take on it. And I think for the longest time, I was a bit opinion that we should just make sure everybody sees it that way. However, especially in the world where everybody's trying to build something and trying to deploy something from local host to the actual internet, I think having a little bit of a...