AWS Finland January Meetup - Sponsored by Sanoma

We kicked off the year at AWS User Group Finland with the January meetup at Sanoma Media Finland’s office on Toolonlahdenkatu in Helsinki. I announced the event the week before and RSVPs opened at noon – spots filled up quickly, which was a good sign for the energy level heading into 2020. Doors opened at 17:30 and talks started at 18:00, with 59 attendees braving the dark January evening. Sanoma generously sponsored the event, providing the venue and refreshments to keep the community energized.

Rolf Koski opened the evening with the usual New & Noteworthy in AWS segment, catching everyone up on the latest service launches and updates. Henrik Wallman from AWS then delivered a deep dive on GitOps with Weave Flux on EKS, covering how to use Istio Service Mesh along with Kiali and Jaeger for observability – a combination that had a lot of people in the audience taking notes. From the host company, Petri Rosenstrom from Sanoma gave a talk titled “Trust your Builders” about empowering development teams, and Pekka Puhakka walked us through how Sanoma uses Amazon Neptune as part of their learning platform.

Having Sanoma host the event was a perfect fit for those talks. There is something about hosting meetups at companies that are actively using AWS in production that makes the conversations more grounded and practical. Hearing directly from Petri and Pekka about real-world use cases at a major Finnish media company made the discussions that followed even more valuable.

Networking over food and drinks after the talks is always one of the highlights of these events. The Finnish AWS community continues to grow, and it was encouraging to see the turnout for the very first meetup of the new decade. Little did we know at the time what 2020 had in store for in-person events.