AWS Finland May Meetup - Sponsored by Zalando

It felt good to be back. After a long stretch of remote everything, the AWS Finland User Group got together for a proper in-person meetup at Zalando’s Helsinki Tech Hub. The energy in the room was something you just cannot replicate over a video call, and this event marked the reactivation of our live meetups.

77 people joined us for the evening, with doors opening at 17:30 and presentations starting at 18:00. Uri Savelchev from Zalando kicked things off with a practical talk on CloudFront authentication and Lambda@Edge, diving into how they handle authentication at the CDN layer. Gunnar Grosch from AWS followed with a thought-provoking session on what comes after CI/CD – continuous configuration. He covered feature flags, operational config, and runtime configuration, including how Amazon uses these patterns at scale. Both talks hit the sweet spot between theory and real-world application.

This meetup marked a real turning point for the user group. We had kept things going online during the pandemic, but getting people physically together again reminded us why we started doing this in the first place. The hallway conversations, the spontaneous introductions, the post-talk discussions – all of it came flooding back.

Big thanks to Zalando for hosting and sponsoring. Having strong technical content from both the host company and AWS made the return to in-person events feel like it was worth the wait.