The day for two topics: GDPR and Schrems II, and Video on Demand
The June meetup – our last one before the summer break – took an interesting turn by pairing two very different topics into one evening. We had 58 attendees join online for a double feature that covered the legal landscape of data transfers in Europe and the technical side of building video-on-demand solutions on AWS.
The first session ran from 18:00 to 19:00 CEST, with Paul Ahlgren, Regional Leader for Security and Compliance Business Acceleration (Nordics and Baltics) at AWS, presenting on “GDPR, Schrems II and CLOUD Act – YES, it’s possible to use the AWS Cloud!” Paul walked through what the Schrems II ruling actually means in practice for companies running workloads on AWS, what AWS has done in response with data residency options and encryption controls, and how to think about compliance without paralysing your cloud strategy. His core message was reassuring: with the right approach, you can absolutely use AWS while staying compliant. It was the kind of topic where having someone from AWS directly address the concerns adds real value, since everyone in the audience was navigating the same uncertainty.
The second session shifted gears completely. Robin Modigh from Knightec presented “Video on Demand – a critical AWS project,” walking through how his team implemented a scaleable VoD platform in just three weeks. The architecture was fully serverless, built on DynamoDB with DAX for caching, S3 for storage, Lambda and API Gateway for the backend logic, and CloudFront for delivery. The frontend was Angular with TypeScript, and the whole thing was deployed using the Serverless framework. Robin showed how the tight timeline forced sharp architectural decisions and how AWS managed services made it possible to ship something production-ready that fast.
The contrast between the two talks actually worked well. It captured the reality of working with cloud – you need to think about both the regulatory environment and the technical architecture at the same time. Good questions from the audience on both fronts, and the kind of evening that makes you appreciate the breadth of expertise in the community.
