Every year, thousands of cloud enthusiasts, vendors and partners gather in Las Vegas for a week of learning and networking (and maybe a little downtime), all in the name of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This year was no different, and in excess of 65,000 people descended upon Las Vegas for the 8^th annual AWS re:Invent conference: an event that continues to get better, and certainly bigger, every year.

Although cloud adoption in government is growing, it can be a challenging technology to envision. Many cloud deployments don’t go as planned, take longer than expected to implement, or fail completely. In the private sector, studies suggest that 74% of those organizations that move an application to the cloud moved it back into their own infrastructure.