AWS re:Invent 2025 — Day 0: Warming Up the Engines

It’s Day 0 of re:Invent — technically not the official start, but anyone who’s been here before knows it’s when the week unofficially begins. This is the day when the city shifts gears, people converge, badges get claimed, airport reunions happen, and AWS quietly warms up the engines.

No announcements yet — not one.
And honestly, I don’t mind.
Today wasn’t about features or service updates. It was about people, energy, and that unmistakable build-up that says: It’s about to begin.

Badge pickup, familiar rituals, and the bottle that keeps returning

Badge pickup remains one of those steady re:Invent rituals: quick, smooth, efficient, and oddly comforting. Within minutes you start bumping into familiar faces — builders, community members, partners, AWS staff, friends you only ever seem to see in Las Vegas. The conversations start before the sessions do.

The swag followed the well-established pattern:

• Hoodie
• Classic re:Invent water bottle, this year with optional personalisation
• Five-year attendee badge, a quiet nod that says “yes, I keep coming back”

Attached to the bottle was the long-running companion of re:Invent hydration: Fill It Forward. It’s not new, and that’s the point. Each time you refill and scan the tag, it contributes to ongoing clean water and sustainability projects in communities that need it. Quiet, consistent, and still one of the better ideas AWS brings to this conference every year.

House of Kiro: developer nightmares, AI dreams

Over at the Venetian, the House of Kiro opened as one of the headline Day 0 experiences. It is a haunted house built entirely from developer pain:

• Walls of unreadable stack traces
• Flickering terminals
• Endless red error text
• 404s lurking in dark corners

All wrapped around a single promise:

“Coding should no longer be a nightmare.”

It is theatrical, slightly ridiculous, and very on-brand for what Kiro is trying to do: move us from late-night firefighting and accidental complexity to something more intentional, guided, and collaborative. Less “I hope this deploy works” and more “the system and the tools are on my side this time.”

While we were queued outside, AWS CEO Matt Garman arrived with a small film crew, recorded a short segment, and then walked straight into the House of Kiro. I definitely saw him enter.

I did not see him leave.

CEO NOT FOUND

On the far side of the experience, as you’d expect, was swag. We were given a choice of two items from a small Kiro collection. I walked away with:

• A Kiro plushy
• A mechanical keyboard keyring that spells KIRO — arguably the only four keys you need this year

Midday Madness, Road to re:Invent, and the sports arena

Over at Caesars Forum, Midday Madness turned Day 0 from “quiet build-up” into “we’re really doing this now.” Last year it felt like Midnight Madness without the name. This year AWS leaned into it and made it official.

The centrepiece was Road to re:Invent:

• Fifty developers
• Ten teams
• One bus from Los Angeles to Las Vegas
• Around five hours to build, ship, deploy, and present — while literally on the move

No rehearsals. No reshoots. Just code, desert, and whatever Wi-Fi the bus could hold together. Their journey ended at Midday Madness where teams shared what they had built. It felt less like a polished competition and more like a rolling proof that the community still thrives on constraints, chaos, and collaboration.

Alongside that, the Sports Forum kept the energy level exactly where you’d expect for a Sunday in Vegas before a conference:

• F1 pit stop simulator (if you’re on the wheel gun, you are absolutely the one they’ll blame)
• Circular table tennis
• Mini golf and live NFL on screens that probably have their own CIDR blocks
• And the return of the chicken wing eating contest

The rules of the wing event remain surprisingly simple: as many as you can, as fast as you can. It is not clear who won, but it is very clear that the chickens did not.

The whole afternoon had that particular re:Invent feel: noisy, colourful, a bit chaotic, and somehow still full of useful conversations.

And still no announcements

By this point last year, AWS had already dropped a considerable number of pre-keynote announcements. This year, Day 0 stayed completely silent on that front.

No new services.
No “by the way, this is now GA.”
Nothing.

I’m not disappointed. If anything, it usually means the keynotes are carrying something heavier, and AWS is choosing to keep the story intact rather than drip-feed it ahead of time.

So for now:

• Badges are collected
• Bottles are tagged and ready to scan
• Kiro has successfully haunted a few thousand developers
• Midday Madness has burned off the travel fatigue

re:Invent has not officially started yet, but everything around it clearly has.

See you on Day 1.