AWS User Group Finland May Meetup #2 at KONE

The second May meetup took us outside the Helsinki city center to KONE’s building in Keilasatama, Espoo. Doors opened at 16:30 and greetings started at 17:00. 68 people made the trip to this iconic location, and it was worth it. There is something fitting about discussing cloud technology at the headquarters of a company known for moving people up and down.

Antony Charles, Oleg Kolodiy, and Mohanjith Sudirikku opened the evening with a talk on KONE’s journey on DML with AWS technology, giving the audience a look at how a major industrial company approaches data and machine learning at scale. Then Stephan Volkl and Mikko Mattila introduced KONE Gecko, a GenAI platform built on AWS, which sparked a lot of interest in the room – seeing a traditional industrial company build its own generative AI platform was impressive. Allan Knabe from Apiable closed out the presentations with a talk on the missing piece of the puzzle: an API developer portal for Amazon API Gateway, addressing a gap that many in the audience recognized from their own projects.

Having the meetup in Espoo also brought out some attendees who might not always make it to the Helsinki-centered events, which is great for broadening the community. The venue was spacious and KONE kept the evening running until 20:30.

Two meetups in one month and both pulled solid crowds. The Finnish AWS community is clearly thriving, and the variety of host companies – from consulting firms to industrial giants – shows how widespread AWS adoption is across different industries in Finland.