AWS Finland March Meetup in Jyväskylä - Sponsored by Cinia

This was a special one. For the first time in a while, we took the AWS Finland User Group outside the Helsinki bubble and traveled to Jyvaskyla. NordHero sponsored the event and we had a packed agenda with doors opening at 17:00 and the program kicking off at 17:30.

Pekka Malmirae, CEO and Founder of NordHero, welcomed everyone and set the stage for the evening. Rolf Koski, VP of Technology at Knowit, opened the talks with a session on designing architectures according to AWS Well-Architected principles, framed around the practical question of what an SLA really means in the cloud era. Ankit Nigam, a Solutions Architect from AWS, followed up with a talk about AWS SaaS Boost and how open source meets SaaS to accelerate the path to multi-tenant architectures on AWS. Janne Kuha, CTO and Founder of NordHero, closed the technical sessions with a deep dive into practical data analytics using AWS Glue and Athena.

Around 40 people showed up, which was a solid turnout for a regional event. It was clear that there is genuine interest in AWS community activities outside the capital region. The audience was engaged and the conversations felt fresh – different crowd, different perspectives, but the same enthusiasm for cloud. The mix of topics, from architecture principles to SaaS patterns to hands-on analytics, gave everyone something to take home.

Taking the meetup to Jyvaskyla was something we had been thinking about for a while, and I’m glad we finally made it happen. Finland’s tech scene is not just Helsinki, and the community deserves events closer to home. NordHero was a fantastic host and Pekka wrapped up the evening nicely. Hopefully this opened the door for more regional meetups in the future.