AWS Finland February Meetup - Sponsored by Nordcloud

February’s AWS Finland meetup was hosted by Nordcloud at their headquarters on Antinkatu in Helsinki. Doors opened at 17:30 and the event kicked off at 18:00. With 75 attendees, the turnout was even stronger than January’s event, showing that the community momentum was building nicely heading into the new year.

Nordcloud brought their deep expertise to the table with two solid talks. Petri Kallberg presented on “Practical FinOps in Practice,” breaking down how organizations can gain visibility into and control over their cloud spending – a topic that resonated with pretty much everyone in the room, since cloud cost management is one of those challenges that only grows as your AWS footprint expands. Juha Mustonen then shifted gears entirely with a talk on using machine learning to build smart security cameras, showing how Nordcloud has been applying ML services on AWS to real-world use cases.

The Q&A sessions after both presentations were lively. People had real questions about challenges they were facing in their own AWS environments, from FinOps tooling to ML inference at the edge, and both Petri and Juha were generous with their time and knowledge. This kind of peer-to-peer learning is what makes the meetup community so valuable.

After the formal part of the evening wrapped up, the networking continued over pizza and drinks. Nordcloud always knows how to take care of their guests. Conversations ranged from serverless architectures to multi-account strategies, and it was clear that the Finnish AWS community was maturing in terms of the complexity of workloads people were running.

This turned out to be one of the last large in-person meetups before the world changed. We were fortunate to have such a strong gathering while we still could.