AWS re:Invent 2026: An In-Depth Guide

AWS re:Invent 2026 is the event of the year for all things cloud and AI. Cloud professionals from around the world will gather to hear what AWS is shipping next, get time with AWS engineers, and build connections that outlast the week.

Join Spacelift at AWS re:Invent! We’ll be at Booth #1390, so drop by to say hello and talk to our team about our favorite subject: delivering secure, cost-effective, and high-performance infrastructure.

Read on to discover everything you need to know about AWS re:Invent 2026, as well as a review of the 2025 version, and suggestions for other events that might interest you.

AWS re:Invent is the world’s biggest cloud conference, created by leading global cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). A learning conference for the international cloud community, AWS re:Invent has grown to become the no. 1 annual event for cloud enthusiasts the world over. It takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada, and this year it runs from November 30 to December 4.

The focus is on AWS, but there is something here for every cloud user. You get sessions in every format, keynotes from AWS leadership, and the kind of hallway conversations that only happen when the whole community is in one place. Nearly half of last year’s attendees were there for the first time, so you won’t be the only one finding your way around.

Interested? Here are a few things you need to know:

When and where is AWS re:Invent 2026 taking place?

AWS re:Invent always happens in Las Vegas. This year it runs November 30 to December 4 across six venues:

• Caesars Forum
• Caesars Palace
• Encore
• MGM Grand
• The Venetian
• Wynn

Friday, December 4, is a half day, with sessions running 8:00 AM–12:30 PM at The Venetian and Wynn | Encore only, so book your flight home accordingly.

Pricing

A full conference pass costs $2,499. That gets you access to all the sessions, and there are more than 2,000 to choose from! There is also a free virtual option: Keynotes and select live programming will be livestreamed, with registration for the livestream opening later this year.

To register for the in-person event, you will need an AWS Builder ID, which is also how you sign in to the AWS Events app. You have the option to buy Group passes if you are going to attend with colleagues.

Accommodation

As you might expect with an event this popular, all of the campus hotels are booking out quickly for AWS re:Invent 2026. Stay on the strip so you’re close to the venues and don’t have to rely on taxis to get to your sessions.

Discounted rates are available after registration: Once you’ve registered, book through your attendee portal, where the discount applies automatically with no code needed. Sleeping room blocks close November 5, 2026, so reserve early.

One rule that catches people out: Gaming regulations mean you must be 21 to book any campus hotel except Treasure Island, unless you check in with someone who is.

Transport

If you’re traveling on foot, leave at least 30 to 45 minutes to get from one venue to another. Shuttles run continuously between properties during conference hours, and you need a valid badge to ride. Badge holders also ride the Las Vegas Monorail free by showing their badge at the entrance.

Shuttle times and stop locations go into the AWS Events app and onto signage during event week, so check there rather than planning around last year’s routes.

Bonus tip: re:Play is held at Allegiant Stadium this year, with dedicated shuttles running Thursday evening from 6:15 to 11:00 PM.

You’ll find the latest technology on show at the re:Invent Expo, where you can engage directly with sponsors from industry-leading companies and learn from subject matter experts at sponsored speaking events. Sponsors are categorized as follows:

• Emerald: Including global professional services company Accenture, AI research labs Anthropic and OpenAI, and monitoring and security platform Datadog
• Diamond: Including customer experience platform Salesforce and computing giant Intel
• Platinum: Including cloud security platform Wiz, and authentication and authorization services provider Okta.
• Gold: Including Spacelift, connected workspace platform Notion, and secure password manager 1Password,
• Bronze: including Japanese IT services and hardware company Fujitsu and secrets management platform Infisical
• Showcase: Including business newspaper The Wall Street Journal and industrial technology company Siemens

We asked some of our engineers for their must-attend re:Invent sessions. These are the ones they’ve bookmarked, and don’t worry if there’s a clash because many are repeated:

1. COP350-S | 5 Questions Terraform, OpenTofu, and CloudFormation Can’t Answer (sponsored by Spacelift, Inc.)
2. COM302 | The judgment gap: when Terraform scans clean but fails the audit
3. ARC305 | The cost of over-engineering: When your architecture fights you
4. COP402 | Scaling operations with MCP, ACP, and A2A
5. INV510 | Inside Amazon S3: How a one-page design reached planetary scale
6. OPN301 | Governing AI assets at scale with MCP Gateway and Registry
7. COM301 | Context Over Code: Making AI-Native Development Work at Scale
8. SEC220-S | Move AI agents from prototype to production with 1Password (sponsored by 1Password)
9. SEC285-S | Automate and Scale Cloud Operations with Purpose-Built AI Agents (sponsored by Datadog)
10. DVT310 | Agentic development with AWS Cloud Development Kit
11. COP312-R | Embed FinOps into your CI/CD pipelines

With access to the world’s leaders in cloud technology, all together in one place for a week, you probably need no convincing that AWS re:Invent is a must-attend event for cloud professionals. Between attending learning sessions and meeting AWS experts, you could absorb a year’s worth of learning in a single week.

Here are just some of the benefits of attending re:Invent:

• Increase your expertise in core AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Aurora.
• Apply technical best practices in cloud architecture, continuous deployment, large-scale migrations, security, and agentic AI.
• Gain real, practical experience at technical bootcamps, self-paced labs, two-hour workshops, and hackathons.
• Meet cloud experts from all over the world and build truly valuable connections.

Security is worth a special mention this year. AWS folded re:Inforce into re:Invent for 2026, so security content runs all week, with a dedicated focus day on Thursday, December 3 at the Wynn.

Before you embark on what promises to be a highlight of your year, think carefully about what you want to achieve with your first trip to AWS re:Invent 2026:

• Which sessions do you consider unmissable?
• Is in-person networking going to be a priority for you?
• What about hands-on learning?

Once you’ve set your priorities, make a plan for what to do during the day and after hours.

Research: Review the AWS re:Invent campus map and figure out how you are going to navigate it to make sure you attend everything and don’t miss out on only-at-re:Invent opportunities.

Be prepared: Before you fly, make sure you have everything you need to make the best impression. Whether it’s a glossy digital portfolio or sleek business cards, everything should align perfectly with your brand.

Pick your spots: There is no shortage of places to meet, so plan where you are going to have your business meetings in advance. Whether it’s a quiet cafe or a buzzing lounge, there is somewhere on the strip with the vibe you’re looking for.

Have fun: After hours, Vegas comes alive, and re:Invent has its own social calendar. Keep some energy for the re:Play party on Thursday, December 3 from 6:30 to 10:30 PM at Allegiant Stadium, with live music, curated food, games, and a few surprises AWS is keeping quiet about.

Spacelift loves re:Invent! We always bring a full-strength team to Las Vegas to answer your questions about infrastructure management, and this year is no different.

Find us at Booth #1390 in the Expo Hall. We’ll have swag, live demos, and the friendliest and most knowledgeable team ready to chat about how Spacelift helps platform teams, DevOps practitioners, SREs, and application developers keep infrastructure moving at the same speed as everything else. Your developers already ship at AI speed; come and see how your platform team keeps up, from day 1 provisioning through day 2 operations, without loosening a single guardrail.

If you’d prefer a deeper one-on-one conversation, you can schedule a meeting with us in our meeting room on the Expo floor.

Lightning talk: 5 Questions Your IaC Can’t Answer

Catch the Spacelift team’s lightning talk on Wednesday, December 2. In 20 minutes, we’ll walk through five questions that Terraform, OpenTofu, and CloudFormation leave unanswered, from where your run time actually goes to whether an AI agent can be trusted with an apply. Add it to your calendar so you don’t miss it.

Spacelift at Topgolf Las Vegas

Join us for an evening at Topgolf Las Vegas on Tuesday, December 1, from 6:30 to 9:30 PM PT. You’ll find it at 4627 Koval Lane, a short hop off the Strip.

Expect three hours of gameplay, a taco bar, and a live leaderboard across every bay. No golf skills required. Come ready to play, eat, and talk infrastructure. Space is limited, so register early to save your spot.

Hundreds of new capabilities and improvements were announced in Vegas last year. Here are just a few takeaways:

• Graviton5: AWS’s fifth-generation CPU, and the most powerful and efficient chip it has built, delivering the best price performance across a broad range of EC2 workloads.
• Frontier agents: Three agents that work autonomously for hours or days without intervention: the Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. The DevOps Agent acts as an autonomous on-call engineer, analyzing data across CloudWatch, GitHub, ServiceNow, and other tools to identify root causes and coordinate incident response.
• AWS AI Factories: Fully managed AWS AI infrastructure deployed inside your own data centers, with pre-integrated foundation models, specialized hardware, and AWS services, for teams that have data residency requirements to meet.
• Lambda Managed Instances and Durable Functions: Managed Instances run Lambda functions on EC2 compute while keeping serverless simplicity, giving you specialized hardware and EC2 pricing models with AWS still handling the infrastructure. Durable Functions coordinate multi-step workflows reliably for anything from seconds to a year, without paying for idle compute while you wait on an external event or a human decision.
• Amazon EKS Capabilities: Fully managed platform capabilities for workload orchestration and cloud resource management, which removes a layer of Kubernetes infrastructure maintenance.

Attending re:Invent is not something you do on a whim; it requires considerable advance planning, so if you’re too late for this year, start making plans early for 2027. In the meantime, don’t forget about all the other valuable tech conferences out there. There’s something happening somewhere almost every week — your biggest issue might be trying to decide which ones to attend!

Don’t worry, we keep an up-to-date list of DevOps conferences and events to make it easier for you.

AWS re:Invent is the highlight of the global cloud community’s calendar. Cloud professionals from around the world gather to see what’s launching, pick up skills, meet AWS experts, and catch up with friends old and new. AWS CEO Matt Garman delivers the CEO Keynote on Tuesday, December 1, and the rest of the week’s launches land on the keynote stage alongside it.

With hundreds of sessions and reserved seating already open, it pays to identify your priorities and plan your schedule before you land. You can also book meetings in advance with industry-leading companies such as Spacelift.

We’ll be at Booth #1390. Drop by and discover why Spacelift and AWS make a perfect cloud match.