AWS re:Invent 2019 Swag Review

The complete guide to swag from the biggest cloud conference in the world — it was the year of the reusable straw

Well, it’s December 2019 and you know what that means — it’s AWS re:Invent time again! While the announcement of new services are great, let’s get to the real fun — a swag review from the biggest cloud conference in the world.

This year I tried as hard as possible to give a COMPLETE review of re:Invent swag. I visited almost every single booth, save for a few that either had no swag or were only offering a sticker or some chocolate.

I also didn’t collect things I got a LOT of in previous years — so less socks, no pins and no t-shirts. I did however take photos of as many of them as possible, as there were still some amazing designs out there!

So, without further ado, here we go!

Amazon

We begin each year with the hoodie and the bottle. This year AWS have gone blue and it looks fantastic! It also comes with the re-usable bottle as well, which are solid and were available in a bunch of colors. They also worked together with Cupanion which will donate water every time your bar code is scanned.

AWS Certification Lounge
Next we head over to the certification lounge to get our certified swag! This year, a pullover, socks, pin and sticker. The pullover is very nice, with a thin sports-like fabric. Thanks cert team!

4k/8k Charity Run
For the 4th year running I will be taking part in the charity run, this year it promises to be a lovely 0c/32f degrees.. brrrrrr ❄️ To make up for that, the t-shirt is really nice!

Throughout the week there was also a bunch of swag available depending on the different AWS booth departments you visited. Last year I scored a spoon with “Serverless for breakfast” teaspoon on it. This year the Serverless booth gave out a “Serverless for lunch” fork, and I look forward to my Serverless for butter knife in 2020 and Serverless for dessert spoon in 2021!

re:Play

The biggest tech party of the year always has some cool shirts and this year did NOT disappoint! They were really awesome neon t-shirts. One was a 3d text rotation thing and the other was space invaders.

A Cloud Guru
And then we move on to our own swag from A Cloud Guru — this years t-shirt. We didn’t choose the life, it chose us!

Ultra exclusive ACG swag: work for us and I’ll get you one of these light up shirts for re:Play. It’s extremely rare, but a good enough incentive to come work for us, don’t you think? ;-)

Swag of the year

I have two winners this year for my favorite pieces of swag.

Anitian

The first goes to Anitian for their packets of Stumptown Coffee. I’d never seen bags of coffee being given away before, a truly unique and well received offering from the tech crowd!

Since writing this I have also been notified that Kenna Security had coffee at BlackHat in 2017. I don’t get to visit BlackHat but I love the trend!

Lucidchart

There’s really no explanation required here, Lucidchart were giving out hammocks amongst all their other cool swag. HAMMOCKS!

Honorable mention — Solace

I *loved* solace’s keychain Sriracha sauce! such a cool idea and also the first time I’ve seen it at a conference (the pop top was cool too).

Fresh Swag

Last year pins were all the rage, in 2017 the socks were the new thing (and are still quite popular in 2019), but this year the new and environmentally conscious swag was re-usable metal straws.

I think about 8 different companies gave them out this year, and they are a fantastic idea. All came with a pipe cleaner too, which is useful for keeping them clean.

Some were also collapsible as well, which is super convenient! Straws came courtesy of Rackspace, LG, Barracuda, GitLab, DXC, Acquia, Tech Mahindra and the AWS Partner Network (and probably a few more I missed).

The Booth Run

This is where I attempted to visit every booth to see what they were giving away. There’s no bad here, everyone put in a lot of effort and were really happy to show me what they had.

Thank you to ALL the booth staff and marketing staff and everyone involved in letting me take these photos and welcoming me with open arms, even our own competitors who were wondering why on earth I was at their booth. I just wanted to show the world the swag!

So, let’s get started in no particular order except the one I used to attempt to navigate the expo floor.

Compute Software had some awesome cable organizers and stickers

BMC gave out an Oculus Quest and a claw machine with lots of goodies

FireEye with the playing cards

Forcepoint had Rubiks cubes and lip balm

SuSe with the amazing plush geckos, socks, stickers and webcam covers!

Postman had shirts, fidget spinners and an awesome collection of stickers

CloudLink with the sweet sunglasses, tickets, pins and pens

Velocity had pens, straws, cups, travel bags and so many things:

Percona had candy, sunglasses, a really nice cup and.. I think they’re more stickers or tape? (please let me know if you know what that orange roll is :D)

Hitachi had some really nice clear bottles and koozies (I think)

Goldman Sachs Engineering had some sweet bluetooth speakers, pens, mints and travel mug.

Citrix had pens, mints, a nice tote bag and car charger

ThreatModeler had hats and phone card holders

Infinidat had a really nice shirt and pin

Split Software were giving out Nintendo Switch Lite’s which I seriously wanted and didn’t win 😢 (the wall of them was very cool though).

At Sysdig, you didn’t pick your swag, Zoltar did it for you.

And they had awesome bottles, stickers, international power adapters and pop sockets.

Datica Health had some sleek notebooks, pens and webcam covers

Giant Swarm had some SWEET t-shirts and even a baby onesie!

RoundTower had a koozie, a shirt, pin and socks!

Timescale had sunglasses, lip balm, a tote bag and coasters

DXC had a shirt, straw, socks, stickers, pen and notebook, as well as a cable holder/taco thing.

Fastly had a really nice wooden wireless phone charger, stickers and a shirt.

neqto by JIG-SAW had clips, stickers, phone holders, pens and silly putty (I think?)

Signal Sciences with the live WAF love shirt, and the booth staff were excited to model it, so thank you for that!

VictorOps has been a favourite of mine since their 2016 custom t-shirt printing station, this year they were giving out the Millennium falcon, pins and their famous cat shirt!

Coalfire had a fire tv stick and amazon alexa you could win

VividCortex always deliver with their hats! unicorns, wolves, bears.. and.. I’m sure I had a seal or snow leopard in my 2016 review.

LaunchDarkly had an awesome looking bandanna and stickers

Quest had light up bouncy balls, cups, stickers, pens and stick-a-ribbons!

Rubrik never disappoint with their socks and stickers.

Cloudability not only had their shirts, they also gave away Nintendo Switches and Oculus Quests!

D2IQ had an AMAZING custom t-shirt stand. I always have full respect for the people running these things, it’s extremely hard work to pump out these shirts all day long and they did such a great job.

DataDog are a staple of reInvent, their shirts are a hot item, and even rarer are their socks, this was from their business booth.

Pluralsight had a game at their booth to see what you won, they had wall adapter power banks, 3-in-1 chargers, some funky socks and even an Oculus Go.

Rapid7 had a nice t-shirt and stickers

Lightstep had a drone, pens, lanyard and awesome shirt and stickers!

Delphix had a SWEET Starwars theme, they had light sabers and the cutest luggage tags i’ve ever seen.

Cohesity with the greenest socks you’ll ever see! and a squishy truck! my son loves these things!

intermix.io had a pretty sweet shirt and sticker

and SenecaGlobal were giving out some mugs, pens, stickers and various echos

Fugue always have some lovely shirts, stickers and webcam covers and this year was no different!

opsani’s shirt and stickers were really colorful as well!

Sun Technologies had a bag for everyone walking past, which from what I saw was roughly 50,000 of them.

CenturyLink had a skill tester with lots of goodies inside

and the AWS JAM Lounge had some powerbanks, shirts, coins and stickers (as well as a memory game I was unable to get a photo of)

CapitalOne had one of the best designed shirts for the event in my opinion, and ran out fast. Also, some awesome decks of cards. Whoever was your designer this year did an outstanding job!

This guy I ran into in the food hall, only guy in the Venetian with more swag than me. Look at that suit. If anyone knows this gentleman's name please let me know as I’d love to link him here ;-)

Splunk always have their catch phrase shirts, pick what you want from the list! also, socks!

TrendMicro had some decks of cards and a chance to win Bluetooth Sunglasses!

Xerox had clips and a dancing robot

PrinterLogic had a fantastic shirt

8x8 had the CUTEST little cheetahs

LG had a push the button game with lots of prizes, including metal straws, echo shows and dots, switches and fitbits.

AVI Networks had a koozie, usb charger cables and a sweet ninja shirt.

Evolven had a great collection of coasters, I really should have taken one of each but my luggage space was basically non-existent at this point. Also pictured: me!

tugboat logic with the cutest stickers and tugboat bath toy

and extrahop with their light up bouncy balls and play-doh

ivanti had sunglasses, a yo-yo, dancing robot and koozie.

Blameless had some drones, Starwars toys, The Unicorn Project, Nintendo Switch Lites, as well as stickers to give away.

The awesome guys I chatted to at Presidio couldn’t stop talking about their luggage tags and the chance to win a 3 piece luggage set (actually awesome, I own the smaller one).

ManageEngine and Device42 with the sweet socks!

komprise with ACTUAL DONUTS and a sticker and pen. But DONUTS. They looked so good… mmm…

Hammerspace had.. a hammer. and a hammer pen. and a t-shirt with a hammer on it. and a USB key with a hammer on it. They’re experts at hammering things, like picking awesome swag.

Igneous had the cable taco things too, and the Imperial Star Destroyer lego to be won

readme had stickers and usb-c converters and gumballs

Qumulo had a Millennium Falcon, webcam covers and an angry carrot dude

Flowmill with BINOCULARS! what an awesome piece of swag! and stickers, too.

Matillion, who a few years ago won my most useful swag prize for a single stick of chapstick have stepped it up so far you can now not only build your own lego person, they donated to Girls who Code for every badge scan. Simply awesome, guys and girls.

I made our founder Ryan Kroonenburg, can you see the resemblance?

Deloitte had a nice bottle

GitHub let you build your own OctoCat!

This PagerDuty mascot Pagey, made of squishy stuff so you can throw it at the wall when your phone keeps buzzing with alerts. We’ve all been there guys, still an awesome piece of swag. Stickers too!

Cloudtamer had pins, stickers, pens and a bottle opener keychain compass carabiner.

NS1 know that it’s always DNS (I completely agree). They also had some mugs and Switches.

Hypergrid had straws which for some reason didn’t make it into my other original post about straws (also pens).

SoftNAS were giving away light up cubes and had a chance to win some cool drones.

Harness had a slot machine with a few prizes, namely their duck mascot!

Threat Stack had the coolest light up AXE and pins, stickers and shirt.

sas had a fidget pen, usb extension cable, stickers, t-shirt and mouse! they also had some giveaways if your key opened the box.

redis had a very nice shirt and stickers and a daily scooter giveaway.

TEKsystems also had straws, stickers and a pin. They didn’t make my original straw post either because a friend wanted some straws, so they got these ones! #sharetheswag

Cloudinary with the CUTEST unicorns and stickers

(x) matters with the fanny pack / bum bag (depending where in the world you’re from) which they advertised as the biggest bag you can bring in to re:Play, which was great because I actually brought it to re:Play to carry my stuff. Thanks guys and girls! oh also, a freakin Electric GoKart up for grabs.

Sentry had BATH BOMBS. This was a really beautiful piece of swag, in both uniqueness and presentation. Really nice work whoever came up with this one, I know quite a few of these went back to our offices to give out to the people who couldn’t attend re:Invent and they were very well received!

Symbee were the booth next to ours last year.. and this year they happened to be next to us again. I’m not sure what the odds of that happening were, but it’s pretty amazing. They’re a great bunch of guys and always have this really nice mug to give out!

GitLab.. how can I put this? They had a whole DINER going on. Coasters were records, they had pins and straws, cold drinks.. and at one point I even got an actual vinyl record from them. I’m going to have to go to my fathers house to listen to what’s actually on it (hard to see in the pic but it is grooved, not just blank).

Sungard had a nice bottle

Unisys had some flashing shoelaces!

and New Relic had A beanie, many colours of their “Deploy glambda” nail polish and stickers! They also had an awesome switch/zelda pack and rubiks cubes.

App Associates had.. so much stuff! pens, hats, bags, stickers, tattoos(!?)

Spotist with the sock chute

Qubole with shot glasses and hand sanitizer and.. i’m not sure what those square things are!

ScyllaDB had these cute octopus dudes, shirts and egg drones!

ServiceNow had the socks and pins (and a pen i didn’t seem to get a photo of)

JFrog had such a cool shirt and frog squishy

Qualys had a huge tote, pins, coin and cards

Nutanix had a great portable anti slip mouse mat, charger cable, luggage tag, sticker and 5000mAh power bank. I really love the design of these!

Our pals at LinuxAcademy had their Pinehead squishies and stickers!

and DOMO had some cool stickers

I mentioned them earlier, but Rackspace also had some stickers in addition to their golden straw!

Liberty Mutual had a nice bluetooth headphone set and sticker!

and memSQL had some really pretty socks and lip balm

Software AG had a huge offering of shirts, socks, stickers and lip balm

Turbot had a skill testing machine where you could win.. actually I’m not sure. Please tag me if you know what these were!

and mongoDB had about a billion of these socks they were giving out all week, they look awesome!

Valtix with the sweet sport socks and t-shirt.

and Snowflake with the I ❤ data shirt and cute polar bear!

Acqueon had these pens with spinny heads and mini footballs.

VMWare had a huge slot machine with a few prizes, t-shirts, bottles, travel organizers, wireless chargers and lens covers.

logz.io had a huuuuge offering of mugs, bottle openers, notepads with a pen, tshirts, foldup backpacks and koozies.

and moogsoft had their squishy cow, nice stickers and pen

Cognizant had a lovely bottle and tote bag

druva had a great shirt, socks and giveaways

RedHat let you CUSTOMIZE YOUR RED HAT. They had a bunch of patches available and you got to pick two of them to be pressed onto your hat. Seriously awesome!

Densify had the BEST light saber at the show, not only does it light up in 3 different colours it makes lightsaber noises as you swing it around. They also had stress balls, a blinking wrist band which could earn you more swag if you were found wearing one, a dancing robot and lip balm.

Jet Brains had an awesome collection of stickers

Logicworks had stickers and the torpedo throw toy

tibco had a hat, usb hub, charger cable, pen, pin, hat, bose headphones and signed mini helmet prizes!! they looked so awesome!

zendesk had the BEST mugs i’ve ever seen at a conference, with the cork bottom to save your table from coffee rings or even heat damage, as well as the wooden wireless chargers.

telos had some pens and charger cables

Hewlett Packard Enterprise had a phone holder, webcam cover, wireless charger (i think?) and an instant photo printer!

arm were very security conscious, providing a webcam cover, mic blocker and USB data blocker.

EDB had bottles, socks, phone card holders, webcam covers and pens!

fortinet were in the sock game as well as a pen.

shi had two awesome sock designs, some stickers and m&m’s

Clubhouse had a FANTASTIC childrens sized t-shirt which my son is now proudly wearing, as well as some awesome stickers, pin and hand sanitizer.

Atlassian had this years version of their awesome socks. I think the first swag socks I ever got were from Atlassian, and I wear them to this day.

McAfee had an awesome tote bag, shirt, bouncy ball and pen

Capsul8 had an awesome trucker cap and Tux the penguin!

The king of socks, Sophos, had their collection on display for me. These aren’t all they give out, they usually have about 10–15 different pairs for any given re:Invent!

dremio had their cute narwhal shirt and plushy

SentinelOne would give you a Rubiks cube (and sticker) if you could solve it. My colleague brock tubre accomplished that in under a minute! (I need a lot more practice).

wish.com had tote bags and a nice t-shirt

and chef had stickers, a pen and a Bagito, which is a reuseable shopping bag.

Sisense spiced things up with their hot sauce and stickers

HANCOM group had some really cute keychain plushies, sticky note pads and some awesomely shiny stickers on offer

Kong had amazing socks, pins, pens and stickers

circleci had stickers and shirts

SailPoint had a pin and an extendable water bottle, which is very cool! I’d never seen that before.

taos had some pens, webcam covers and quicksnap koozies which were really cool.

zadara had a lot of things but by the time I got there they had just pens and organiser bags left over (sorry zadara! lots of booths to get through!)

Logic Monitor had their funky socks

Aporeto had the CUTEST octopus plush toy and shirt which this gentleman was only too happy to show off.

Cloudera had all important bags to carry all the other swag.

SearchBlox had a coaster/bottle opener combo with some stickers

Cloudzero had pins, stickers and a koozie

Informatica had some of the nicest socks at the show, Bombas. Each pair given out also donated a pair to someone in need. They also had some pins.

CloudAcademy had some hats, shirts, cable taco, webcam cover and stickers

CloudFlare had some sweet socks too (anyone counting the total amount of socks yet?)

Transposit had octopus stickers and COSMIK ICE CREAM. I’d never seen this before, seriously cool!

and Rockset had a cool t-shirt

Sumologic with their sumo dudes, always a favourite

StackRox certainly rocked the place with their purple light up bouncy balls, stickers and pens!

Nylas had some fantastic stickers, t-shirt and socks!

Cloudbees had a nice shirt and carry case

and Qualcomm had socks, cord organizers, straws and a phone holder.

Teradata had the only piece of swag I wanted but was unable to get, this awesome tiny bluetooth speaker (it was so cute!), as well as a cable organizer.

Now a word from Check Point, the only booth trying to do away with swag and instead was allowing you to choose two charities they donate to on your behalf instead, Girls who Code and Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Despite this being a swag promoting blog, I think it was a fantastic idea and fully support their mission!

Clumio had a whole range of things on their spin wheel, socks, phone battery packs and charging cables and webcam covers.

Instana had these cool squishy dudes

and Collibra had pens, mins and koozies

Fivetran had socks, shirt, pencil case and phone charging cables

boomi had really nice contigo bottles, stickers and pins

and talend had the socks, pen and webcam cover, and were also giving away a PS4 with PS VR. Sweet!

SignalFx had some bright pink socks, lip balm and some stickers and a pin

and dynatrace had some bright shirts too

tableau had loads of pins, stickers, a REALLY nice backpack and fortune cookies!

Stackery then had a tshirt, pins, stickers and glasses cleaning cloths

GitOps had a difficult rubiks cube (because the center square is actually directional, making it harder than normal), and some stickers

coinbase had some pins and stickers and free bitcoin (one of those may or may not be true).

Thundra had the sweet sunglasses, shirt and stickers

Wandisco had a shirt, a really nice beanie, stress ball, webcam cover and lip balm

O’Reilly had a huge collection of stickers, sunglasses and pens

Refinitiv had some stickers and a cool cube man! If you could fold him back up into a cube you got to keep him!

Prisma (by paloalto networks) had a shirt, webcam cover, pin and socks.

Databricks had heaps of stuff but by the time I got there it was a phone charger, pen and really nice notepad.

Attunity had a nice mug, pen and hand sanitizer

Gremlin had a gremlin!

CTO.ai had a bottle opener, square stress cube, tote bag and tshirt

sigma had a whole bunch of cool things, a hangover kit, t-shirts, stickers and bottle openers

Cloudwiry had hydration packs and a luggage scale, which is really useful for determining if you’ve picked up too much swag before heading home. They also had an amenity kit, pencils and drawing pads, Tide markers, whatever those black and white things are.. they had a lot of useful things that I didn’t have time to ask what they all were!

ChaosSearch had some pens, stickers and some relation to Corey Quinn!

Acquia had the straws, pens and stickers

and imperva had heat packs, sunglasses, cards, vegas survival kit, lint roller, pad and pen. I sadly missed the bacon station they had in the mornings!

synopsys had usb fans and pins

and Slalom had some women who build stickers and shirts

radware also had a wooden cloud dude!

and Wavefront by vmware had these cute little Volkswagon toys that my son absolutely ADORES.

nginx had some stickers and pins

veeam also had some international power adapters, really useful for those of us visiting other countries!

and the AWS Partner Network had hand sanitizer, notepads, straws and another cable taco!

Thanks to the reddit thread comments at https://reddit.com/r/aws/comments/e8wjdj/my_reinvent_2019_swag_review/ I also found I missed a few things, happy to add anything you got that I didn’t see:

NVIDIA gave out PCB rulers which are awesome!

and FINALLY, some AWS serverless heroes were wandering around with #wherespeter shirts. Did you get one? and did you find Peter? I did!

now.. believe it or not… I think that’s it. Every booth I could get to, I did. You’ve seen it all. Well, you think you’ve seen it all. This was also new this year and I’m really impressed it has been implemented AND used:

Super awesome on AWS’s part. Not everyone can take everything home, so being able to donate it instead of throwing things out is a great initiative from AWS.

OK, that’s about it for this year, please let me know what I missed (I realllly tried hard to get everything so if I did miss something I’ll be happy to add it!), I know there will be something awesome (like the DeepComposer) I didn’t have time to line up for. What did you get? what were your favorites? let me know in the comments below!

Thanks Cloud Gurus! and see you all next year.

AWS re:Invent 2019 Swag Review was originally published in A Cloud Guru on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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