AWS Finland September Meetup - Sponsored by IBM

After the summer break, the AWS Finland community came back strong with our September meetup on the 28th, hosted and sponsored by IBM at their Helsinki office. I had opened registration a couple of weeks before the event while we were still finalizing the agenda, and encouraged people to mark their calendars early. It paid off – the turnout was impressive with around 95 attendees filling the space, making it one of our bigger events of the year.

The evening kicked off with Rolf Koski from Knowit asking the room what was new with generative AI in AWS and why they should care – a topic that was on everyone’s mind by late 2023. Ari Palo from Alma Media followed with a practical deep dive into managing configurations in AWS CDK applications, which resonated well with the infrastructure-minded crowd. Then Jarkko Koski and Teemu Seppa from IBM closed out the talks with their presentation on migrating from AWS SDK for JavaScript v2 to v3, sharing the real-world pain points and lessons from making that transition. Building security meant we had a name list at the door, so registration beforehand was essential.

The networking part of the evening was as valuable as ever. Helsinki’s cloud community is tight-knit enough that you keep running into familiar faces, but large enough that there is always someone new to talk to. These meetups are where a lot of real knowledge transfer happens over pizza and drinks.

The mix of topics – generative AI, CDK configuration management, and SDK migration – reflected where the community was at that point in 2023. Teams were not just running workloads on AWS anymore; they were optimizing how they build and manage those workloads.

A solid September meetup that set the tone well for the final stretch of the year.