Cloud services monolith Amazon Web Services is inviting developers, CIOs and start-ups to save November 27-29th on their calendar for AWS re: Invent, a conference to be held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. It’s the first AWS partner conference, and Amazon’s Jeff Barr gives every indication it’ll be the biggest event in the company’s history.

For developers, AWS is promising sessions for novices as well as those better-versed in its cloud platform, with topics including “architecture, monitoring, configuration management, and performance optimization,” according to Barr’s blog entry. Barr promises that start-ups can get a crash course in how adopting Amazon’s cloud platform can save over operating their own servers (at least until you hit a certain point on the pricing curve, but more on that later).

And in the age of the hackathon, it’s no wonder that AWS is hosting a Launch Theater, where stealth startups can launch in front of press, analysts, VCs, and the overall AWS community. And speaking of the community, Amazon is soliciting abstracts from developers or IT pros who want to share their insights around the AWS ecosystem.

“I don’t want to give away any secrets but you can rest assured that this is something you don’t want to miss,” Barr writes.

I can’t help but notice that Amazon re: Invent was announced a few scant weeks after the OpenStack Conference generated tons of buzz for the open source cloud operating system. As I’ve had cause to note already earlier today, Amazon Web Services doesn’t have much to fear from OpenStack and its service provider ecosystem in an immediate sense, but it definitely seems that the time is right for AWS to remind its developers and partners why they’re in business with them in the first place – or else risk developer attrition, the kiss of death for a modern cloud platform.

AWS re: Invent registration will open in June.