Hyderabad's First AWS Community Day - reCap

Over the last decade, I've been an IT professional on weekdays and a Travel & Food Blogger on weekends. Most of my weekends were spent on roads or restaurants.

However, the last weekend was different. I attended the first ever AWS Community Days meetup in Hyderabad, India. And this happened just a week after I was inducted into the AWS Community Builder program.

I thought how would I be able to spend almost 8 hours at a tech meetup, well, didn't realize how time passed. So this post is just a recap of Hyderabad's First AWS Community Day Meetup from my eyes :)

The event took place at Radisson Blu hotel in Banjara Hills, which is quite a popular hotel in the city. The event from what I know was attended by close to 200 folks. I was there in time, but the registrations were in full swing. I got my badge and swags. Met some familiar faces, some new and also the organizers.

Before starting the proceedings, one good thing that the organizers did was to have all the speakers come on the stage and introduce themselves first. That way all of us knew who's who.

Post registrations, we started our day with a keynote by Chandra Balani who spoke about the changing landscape of technology in India citing the example of UPI. He also spoke about how AWS has expanded over the years and now have Hyderabad a region.

Faizal who is the chapter lead for AWS Hyderabad talked about the growth of the community and how more Hyderabadis are required to take up the stage. I'm surely looking to contribute to the group!

This was followed by a Women in Tech panel with Ridhima Kapoor, Bhuvaneshwari Subramani and our very own Megha Arora. The ladies spoke about how it's important to celebrate small victories and keep learning constantly. The also spoke about their challenges and emphasized on the importance of support groups, quite an insightful talk.

Post that, there were different tracks that were taking place simultaneously, however I stuck to the talks that I found relevant and interesting.

The first talk by Ayush Jain was Highway to code-driven infrastructure where he spoke about Infrastructure as Code and how tools like AWS CloudFormation can help automate infrastructure deployment making it faster and less prone to errors.

The next talk was by Jones who gave us a sneak peek into Amazon EventBridge and how we can integrate it with other SaaS products along with some helpful tips and tricks. He's an AWS Hero in the serverless space and I just joined the AWS Community Builder group in the serverless space.

Post lunch, we kicked off the proceedings by a talk on Disaster recovery by Neetu Malan who emphasized on the importance of having DR strategies and discussed important topics like RPO,RTO

This was followed by a session on Terraform and Jenkins automation to streamline AWS cloud resources. An insightful talk by Ashok that had many of us interested.

The last one for the day was on GraphQL and AppSync. Abhishek and Vishal help us understand the concepts and gave a deep dive in AppSync and it's features.

There were regular breaks for tea, lunches and even networking. While technical glitches happened on-and-off, the organizers ensured that things happened as they were supposed to. There was also a session about AWS certification where they gave us insights into the various tracks and certification levels offered along with the learning paths.

Overall, it was an amazing event full of learning and meeting new and old people. Thanks to all the organizers for a wonderful event, already looking forward to the monthly meetups and the next community day event!

PS:_ If you're on Twitter, you can also check out this Twitter thread for event updates and pictures :)_