AWS Finland January Meetup - AWS re:Invent re:Cap - sponsored by Solita

The first AWS Finland meetup of 2023 kicked off with a bang as we gathered at Solita’s office on Etelaesplanadi to go through the highlights from re:Invent 2022. With around 80 people showing up on a cold January evening, the community energy was clearly alive and well after the holiday break.

The Helsinki recap was actually one stop on a broader Nordics re:Cap tour I did that week. It was a packed schedule – I traveled to Malmo for the local AWS re:Invent recap with Marcus Bladh, then met with our Azure team in Copenhagen, and later spoke at the re:Cap session in Oslo alongside Gunnar Grosch, hosted by Anders Bjornestad and Arne Solheim. We missed Anton Babenko in Oslo, but hopefully we catch up soon. I also spoke at the Knowit Developer Summit that same week. Speaking in Oslo was actually my first time speaking there, so it was a memorable trip all around.

The evening opened with Heikki Simperi from Solita presenting a cloud migration case, walking through the practical realities of moving workloads to AWS. It was a grounded and honest talk that set the stage well. Then Rolf Koski and Gunnar Grosch took over for the main re:Invent 2022 re:Cap, walking through the biggest announcements from Las Vegas. re:Invent always delivers a firehose of launches, and the 2022 edition was no exception – from new compute options to data and analytics services, there was plenty to digest. Solita hosted us well with food and drinks, and with name checks at the front door for building security, it felt well organized from the moment you arrived.

What I always enjoy about these recap sessions – whether in Helsinki, Malmo, or Oslo – is hearing how different people react to the same announcements. A feature that one team finds game-changing might fly completely under the radar for another. That cross-pollination of perspectives is what makes both the local user group meetups and the broader Nordics community so valuable beyond just reading the blog posts yourself.

Good start to the meetup year, and a solid reminder that the Finnish and Nordic AWS communities keep growing steadily.