AWS User Group Finland May Meetup - Sponsored by KONE

For the May meetup we headed to KONE headquarters in Espoo on a warm spring evening, and over 50 AWS enthusiasts made the trip. This was the first AWS meetup at KONE, which made it feel like a milestone. Rolf Koski opened the evening with community updates, and Petri Rosenstrom from KONE welcomed everyone to their headquarters. KONE is a global leader in elevators and escalators, and their approach to IoT and cloud at scale is genuinely interesting.

Ursula Koski from AWS set the stage with a security primer for generative AI, covering what teams need to think about as they adopt AI services – a timely topic given how fast the space was moving. Then Diana Andrei from KONE presented on their digital twin solution for people flow management in transit stations, showing how they model and optimize the movement of people through complex environments. Ramya Rajasekharan followed with a deep dive into KONE’s unification of batch and streaming pipelines, covering how they handle the massive streams of sensor data coming from elevators and escalators worldwide. Both KONE presentations were well prepared, and the speakers were open about both successes and challenges.

Hearing how a major industrial company uses AWS in production gives a different perspective compared to the typical software startup talks. The intersection of IoT, digital twins, and cloud services is where a lot of real-world complexity lives, and KONE has plenty of experience navigating it. The depth of the talks sparked a lot of follow-up questions from the audience.

The networking session afterward had good conversations going. The warm spring evening helped keep people around longer than usual. Espoo is a bit further for some Helsinki-based attendees, but nobody seemed to mind once they got there. KONE made sure we were well fed and the atmosphere was welcoming.

Thanks to KONE for sponsoring and hosting their first AWS meetup. It is great to see companies from different industries engaging with the community, and having two strong female speakers lead the evening was a welcome highlight.