Fear and Logging in Las Vegas

“But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas.”

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

In 1971, Sports Illustrated asked Hunter S. Thompson for 250 words of photo captions on a desert race in Las Vegas. He turned in 2,500; the magazine “aggressively rejected” them, and the wreckage eventually became one of the better-known books about that town. I bring this up because I’m headed to Las Vegas myself, also on somebody else’s dime and also with no instructions about what to write. The resemblance ends there. My luggage will hold a laptop and too many chargers, and my attorney is staying home.

On December 1, I’ll be a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at AWS re:Invent , and I’m honored to have been asked. This will be, I believe, my 30th of these events as a delegate, which is more than I can reliably keep track of: I’d have sworn my first was in 2018 until my own blog reminded me that it was Network Field Day 7 in 2014. The early ones run together. In a 2015 post , I said I was always flattered by the invitation and worried that I’d say something stupid or, worse yet, say nothing. Eleven years on, both still hold. The room is full of people who know more than I do, and getting a seat among them is a privilege I don’t take lightly.

Security is the topic, and I’m excited to hear AWS talk about it, largely because I know Azure much better than I know AWS. Knowing one cloud well gets you about as far in another as a phrasebook gets you in a foreign country: a beer and directions to the restroom, but not through an argument with your landlord. I expect the concepts to carry over, and the details and the reasoning behind them to be where I get lost. I’d like to hear how AWS thinks about these problems from the people who built the answers, and then work out for myself how that lines up with what I already know.

So I have questions. AWS frames its shared responsibility model as security “of” the cloud versus security “in” the cloud; where does that line fall in practice, and does it land where I’d expect, coming from Azure? How does AWS want its customers to think about identity? And what is AWS doing about non-human identities and AI agents, which have a way of collecting permissions nobody remembers granting? The schedule isn’t posted as I write this, so I can’t say which of those will come up. I’ll ask anyway.

AWS is also only one company, and I’m just as interested in where the security industry as a whole is heading. At Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC earlier this year, the presenters I covered were all wrestling with versions of one question: can you trust what you’re recovering from? AI agents were already being pointed at as the next problem. I want to see how far that conversation has moved since spring. A couple of days in Vegas won’t settle it, and a conference is a biased sample, since nearly everyone there has something to sell. It’s still a good place to notice when several companies start telling the same story at once.

Some of this is self-interest, and I’d rather say so. PacketQueue, LLC does analyst work and fractional CTO and advisory engagements for technology leaders who have to make expensive decisions about products they haven’t had time to evaluate. A CIO making a call on cloud security needs an answer that didn’t come from a vendor with a quota. The better I understand the major clouds and the market around them, the better PacketQueue can answer.

Which brings me to the disclosure. The event organizers are paying for my flights, hotel, and food. In exchange, they get no editorial input: my coverage is my own, and I decide what I write and how. I also don’t work for any of the organizations involved, in any official capacity or on contract. Those are the same terms I’ve had from Tech Field Day for years, and I’ve eviscerated companies under them, though that’s rare.

Most of the presentations will stream live on the event page and on Tech Field Day’s LinkedIn and YouTube channels, with recordings posted afterward. I will also repost those links on my own channels, both LinkedIn and BlueSky, as they go live. You can follow along with #TFDx and #AWSreInvent. If there’s something you’d like asked of AWS, send it to me on BlueSky and I’ll do what I can.

Thompson had to drum up his own story, and so will I. Whatever I come back with will be mine to answer for, and if you think I’ve gotten it wrong, you’re welcome to respond the way the Dude responded to Jesus Quintana:

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, uh, your opinion, man.”

— The Dude, The Big Lebowski