AWS User Group May Meetup at Nitor

May was a big month for the AWS User Group Finland, and the first of two meetups this month was hosted by Nitor at their 6th floor office on Aleksanterinkatu. Doors opened at 17:00 and the program started at 17:30. The turnout was the highest of the year so far with 91 people showing up. The space was buzzing.

The first talk was a multi-speaker collaboration that perfectly captured the spirit of these meetups. Janne Liuhtonen and Joona Semi from Reaktor, Mika Majakorpi from Nitor, and Luis Velez from KONE presented together on building a customer portal greater than the sum of its parts, covering multi-team microfrontends on AWS. Hearing four speakers from three different companies talk about the same project gave the audience a rare multi-perspective view of the architecture. Then Samppa Saarela, Senior Software Architect at Nitor, shared his adventures in feature branch environments with CDK – a topic that resonated with anyone who has wrestled with environment management. Jesse Aspnas from F-Secure closed things out with a talk on slashing first-touch reaction time with CloudWatch, showing how they use monitoring to speed up incident response.

When you get 90+ AWS practitioners in a room, the collective knowledge is impressive, and it shows in the depth of the discussions that follow each presentation. The Q&A sessions were lively and occasionally turned into mini-debates, which is the best outcome you can hope for.

The networking portion ran past 19:30 as expected. With the Finnish spring finally arriving and the evenings getting longer, people lingered even more than usual. Two meetups scheduled for May is a testament to how much demand there is in this community right now.