AWS Finland August Meetup - Sponsored by WithSecure / F-Secure

Summer break was over and we kicked things off with a bang. WithSecure (formerly F-Secure) hosted the August meetup at their office on Tammasaarenkatu in Helsinki, and the turnout was impressive – 105 people showed up, making this one of the biggest meetups we had organized to date. Doors opened at 17:30 with presentations starting at 18:00 sharp.

The evening had a strong security and scale theme running through it. The WithSecure team presented on T-Rex, their system for providing connected threat intelligence in milliseconds using AWS Neptune as the graph database backbone. The F-Secure side of the house shared a war story about self-inflicted DDoS and other consequences of operating at massive scale – the kind of honest talk about things going wrong that everyone loves but few are brave enough to give. Petri Kallberg from Nordcloud closed the talks with a session on IAM boundaries, explaining how multiple teams can operate independently on a shared AWS account without stepping on each other’s toes.

The WithSecure office was a solid venue. Plenty of space for the crowd, good AV setup, and the team there was welcoming and well-prepared. The content lineup was one of the strongest we had all year – graph databases for threat intelligence, the realities of operating at scale, and practical IAM patterns. Three very different angles on AWS, all relevant and well-delivered.

Breaking the 100-attendee mark felt like a milestone for the user group. The community is growing and the interest is real. Thanks to WithSecure for a memorable evening.