AWS User Group April Meetup at Brightly

I took the train to Helsinki on Wednesday to host the April meetup at Brightly’s office on Pohjoisesplanadi 37A. Doors opened at 16:45 and the program started at 17:30. This was the second time in a row that Brightly opened their doors for the user group, and 72 attendees came out for the evening. Our sincere appreciation goes to Brightly for their continued sponsorship.

Many people have asked me since I co-founded Elexive whether I would continue to lead the AWS communities in the Nordics. It has been a fair question – running a startup can be an all-encompassing life choice. But building communities is something I have always done, and I have no intention of stopping. If anything, it reminds me why I do this work in the first place.

The presentations that evening were outstanding. Pekka Vuorio, Lead Architect, kicked things off with a talk on streaming data pipelines in AWS, covering the architecture and trade-offs of real-time data processing. Then Veli-Matti “Vellu” Ojala, Data and AI Champion at AWS Europe-North, delivered a talk about how Apache Iceberg on AWS will break the software and data development silos – and why you will love it. He brought the kind of energy and conviction that makes you want to go try it out right away. Juha Tiensyrja, Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Oura, closed the evening with a candid look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Oura’s Kubernetes migration, which had the audience both laughing and nodding in recognition.

The community has reached a size where you always run into people you know, but there are also enough new faces to keep things fresh. Moving the meetup to a Wednesday instead of the usual Thursday did not seem to hurt attendance at all, and the energy at Pohjoisesplanadi 37A was exactly the kind of evening that makes all the organizing worth it.