AWS Community Day 2024
Zur Event Agenda
The main event begins on-site on 27th June 2024 from 09:00.
Community Talks:
Look forward to a variety of talks, presented by the community
for the community.
Our speakers will share their latest insights and experiences
from the AWS field.
Choose your favourite topics and learn from experts and
current projects in the AWS universe.
Networking
Zum Party-Pass
Make use of the numerous breaks to connect with other
participants and exchange ideas. Networking is a core
component of Community Day,
and we have created many opportunities for it.
Evening Aperitif:
The day concludes with a relaxed aperitif, where you have the
opportunity to continue networking in a relaxed atmosphere and
reflect on the day.
Previous number of AWS Community Days in the DACH region
Number of (registered) AWS user groups in the DACH region
Max. Number of participants
Organizers 2024
Our Sessions
Find the current agenda here
The event depends on your participation. Below you will find an overview of the currently planned talks that you can watch on 27.06.2024. The agenda is still being fine-tuned.
Welcome and Registration
Introduction and Keynote - Embracing GenAI and Mastering Security - Unleashing the Power of AWS in Switzerland
Coffee Break
Building Reliable Serverless Applications with AWS CDK and Testing
More Network Security: Forward Proxy on AWS Network Firewall & Fargate
Coffee Break
Deploying Secure Landing Zones in highly regulated sectors
It's RAG Time, baby!
Lunch
From Zero to Hero - Frictionless CI/CD pipelines in projen
Enhancing Business Continuity and Ransomware Protection with Veeam Cloud Mobility and AWS
Coffee Break
How to use modern serverless with GraphQL
You don't need a Lambda for this. Refactor your serverless app.
Coffee Break
Serverless ❤️ Green Software - Making Batch Jobs More Sustainable
LocalStack: Turbocharging feedback loops for developing AWS cloud apps
Coffee Break
Plug-and-Play AI: Leveraging Amazon Q Business for Enterprise Solutions
Database Freedom - How to migrate from Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL Live
Christoph Schnidrig
Keynote
Christoph Schnidrig
Christoph Schnidrig has built his professional career with extensive experience in systems engineering and ethical hacking. After several years in these technical roles, he took on leadership positions, leading teams in systems engineering and solutions architecture. In his current position as Head of Technology at AWS in Zurich, he played a central role in the launch of the Swiss AWS region and contributes to technological development there.
Raphael Manke
Building Reliable Serverless Applications with AWS CDK and
Testing
Raphael Manke
Raphael Manke is a full-stack developer and consultant with five years of experience in developing serverless applications in the AWS cloud. AWS CDK changed his way of defining infrastructure as code dramatically and he likes to share his experiences and challenges along the way.
Jochen Zehnder
Deploying
Secure Landing Zones in highly regulated sectors
Have you ever wondered how cloud infrastructure really works, especially in places where the rules are strict, like financial services and banking? Well, Landing Zones are crucial to getting things right, but boy, can they vary—across different platforms and even within AWS itself!
Join us as we break down the basics of AWS Landing Zones with a unique look at how they're put together for regulated industries. We'll walk you through some crucial design decisions and what they mean for keeping your AWS accounts secured and running smoothly. It's not just about setting things up but ensuring everything stays as it should—no sneaky misconfigurations allowed!
We'll also discuss how to run your applications using an Amazon EKS cluster as the platform foundation. How many clusters should you manage? What about services that don't fit inside the cluster? And who is in charge of setting these up and keeping them going?
To simplify your life, you can achieve all this using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). You'll learn some handy tips and tricks on implementing IaC and the best patterns to use for different parts of your setup.
So, whether you're looking to tighten security or streamline operations, this talk will help you navigate the complexities of deploying Landing Zones in sectors where compliance isn't just a suggestion—it's a must.
Jochen Zehnder
Jochen Zehnder, a Partner and Cloud-Native Consultant
at 56K.Cloud, brings a wealth of experience spanning
software engineering, system administration, and
on-premise and public cloud management. His extensive
career has endowed him with a robust understanding of
the DevOps lifecycle, enabling him to tailor solutions
that align perfectly with team capabilities. What sets
Jochen apart is his unique blend of technical
expertise and leadership experience, developed through
building software engineering teams and consulting for
both small and large companies across various
industries. This offers a distinctive and intriguing
perspective on today's technical challenges.
Active in the developer community, Jochen engages with
peers through speaking engagements and contributes as
a Docker Community Leader and an AWS Community
Builder. His dedication to sharing knowledge and
fostering community collaboration makes him a valued
voice in the cloud-native landscape.
Thorsten Höger
From Zero to
Hero - Frictionless CI/CD pipelines in projen
Thorsten Höger
Thorsten is a Cloud Automation Evangelist at
Taimos, where he
advises customers on using AWS. As a developer, he
focuses on improving development processes and
automating everything to build efficient deployment
pipelines for customers of all sizes.
As a supporter of open-source software, Thorsten
maintains or contributes to several projects, mainly
developer tools for AWS. He is the president of the
Open Construct Foundation and maintainer of the
Community-Driven CDK Construct Library. He is also a
board member of the support association for the AWS
community in the DACH region.
Before becoming self-employed, Thorsten was a
developer and CTO of Germany's first private bank
running on AWS. He and his colleagues migrated the
core banking system to the AWS platform in 2013. Since
then, he has frequently spoken at conferences,
meetups, barcamps, and other community events.
Igor Soroka
How to use modern
serverless with GraphQL
In the year 2024, serverless is much more than just AWS Lambda Functions. Now, it is a full-blown ecosystem of managed services with the concept of paying for what you use. The API level could be written without computing services like Lambda Functions or containers with Fargate. I will show the audience how to deploy the GraphQL API with JavaScript Resolvers, EventBridge, and CDK. Disclaimer: no Lambda Functions will be called during the talk and a demo.
Igor Soroka
I am a software consultant working with AWS and serverless for the last couple of years. My background includes experience with companies of all sizes. I value collaboration with a focus on innovations in the software development process.
Manuel Wessner
Serverless ❤️
Green Software - Making Batch Jobs More Sustainable
Green IT is gaining increasing importance, and as an industry, we must actively contribute to addressing climate change by ensuring that our software doesn't impose unnecessary environmental burdens.
In this presentation, you get introduced to the concept of Green Software Development and we dive into the idea of Demand Shifting, specifically Time Shifting. It will be demonstrated how we can put this concept into practice. Through efficient scheduling, you can reduce the CO2 emissions of your (batch) jobs. We'll utilize AWS Serverless technologies such as Step Functions, EventBridge and Lambda, along with the open-source tool 'carbon-aware-sdk.'
A key takeaway from this talk is that sustainability in IT isn't just an idea; it can be seamlessly integrated into our daily routines with minimal effort. Moreover, the methods I'll showcase are applicable to other cloud providers and environments as well.
Manuel Wessner
All things cloud - Software developer with a heart for
Open Source. His primary focus is currently on
Serverless and all things related to the Cloud. Manuel
is fluent in Java, Kotlin, and TypeScript, and he's a
big advocate for Clean Code and Refactoring.
When he's not promoting Green Software Development
practices, he is sometimes allowed to break things on
purpose in the name of Chaos Engineering.
Linda Mohamed
Plug-and-Play
AI: Leveraging Amazon Q Business for Enterprise Solutions
Challenges and Opportunities in AI Implementation:
Challenges: These include difficulties in initiating AI projects, poor data quality and access, integrating AI with existing systems without disruption, scaling pilot projects, and lack of adequate IT tools.
Opportunities with AWS: The presentation highlights solutions
like Amazon Rekognition for image and video analysis, Amazon S3
for data storage, AWS Lambda for system integration, and Amazon
SageMaker for scalable model training and deployment.
From Prototype to Production: It discusses the journey of
creating enterprise-level AI solutions that are customizable
with proprietary data, covering the development, data
management, and the decision-making process based on detailed
business cases.
AI Service Agent Demo: I will show you how to implement a chatbot with Amazon Q Business.
Linda Mohamed
Linda has been navigating the tech landscape for over
a decade. She is specialized in Cloud Technologies, IT
Process Optimization, and Agile Methodologies. When
she is not guiding companies on their cloud journey,
she is diving into AI/ML Services and Technologies,
and sharing her insights at AWS community events and
other tech platforms.
Beyond her professional commitments, Linda is an AWS
Community Hero and deeply involved in Women in Tech
initiatives, advocating for greater representation and
inclusivity. In Vienna, she is the familiar face
behind AWS meetups and other community gatherings,
creating a welcoming space where every voice is valued
and heard. In addition, Linda holds the title of
Chairperson for the AWS Community DACH Support
Association and is member of the Funding Advisory
Board of netidee.
Michal Salanci
More Network Security: Forward Proxy on AWS Network
Firewall & Fargate
Our customer asked as for powerfull, and scalable forward proxy, so we mixed AWS Network Firewall, with Squid Proxy, Fluentbit, Dnsmasq and Telegraf containers powered by Amazon Fargate to craft this juicy serverless smoothie.
🌐 AWS Network Firewall is main indigence as a transparent proxy. We combined stateful and stateless NFW rules for powerful, scalable and AWS managed transparent forward proxy. NFW rules are whitelisting the IPs and URLs our customer wanted, and blocking everyting else.
There is always a demand for good old classic stuff, that's why 🦑 Squid Proxy (open source) is backing up AWS Network Firewall and serves as explicit proxy, as there was a demand for it. We put this tool into a ECS container for easier… everything. Fluentbit log forwarder runs as sidecar container in the same ECS task, for forwarding the logs into AWS CloudWatch.
Using the forward proxy, our customer started to face the let's encrypt issue therefore 🔧 Dnsmasq (open source) running in ECS container was included to solve that. It acts as a DNS forwarder and resolves the DNS challenges coming with let's encrypt, when trying to obtain SSL/TLS certificates.
Every good tool needs to me montitored, so 📈 Telegraf (open source) is here to help us with monitoring the performance of both transparent and explicit proxies in a near real time. It runs in ECS container in a "service" VPC and constantly monitoring the performance. AWS CloudWatch metrics are sent to Grafana for better visualization, and in case of any issue AWS CloudWatch alarm calls for action.
All those containers would be difficult to manage, so it's all managed by 🧙♂️ Amazon Fargate a serverless solution for ECS containers to do all the magic we are lazy to do.
Last but not least - putting all the proxy components into a single VPC, gives us better log visibility, higher level of security and reduced cost.
Michal Salanci
My name is Michal Salanci, and I am a Senior DevOps Engineer at Deutsche Telekom in Slovakia. I am 40 years old and the proud father of two beautiful girls. For many years, I worked as a Network Engineer, handling various networking equipment such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and more. In 2021, I made a career shift towards AWS, where I primarily concentrate on networking, serverless architectures, and container technologies.
Piero Bozzolo
It's RAG Time, baby!
Piero Bozzolo
Cloud Pastry Chef, Solution Architect, AWS trainer champion. I've been launching instances in the cloud since 2011. Today, I work at Claranet alongside developers and researchers to help their code and ML models live long and run cost-effectively in the cloud.
Marco Fernandez
Business Continuity and Ransomware Protection with Veeam
Cloud Mobility and AWS
Marco Fernandez
Marco Fernandez has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry. He specializes in the centralized deployment of applications and secure data management in data centers. Given the wide array of products available, he emphasizes integrating these into the cybersecurity strategy to ensure IT effectively supports and protects business processes. As a Presales Manager at Veeam, Marco values sharing experiences, believing that learning and growing together is key to success.
Raphael Manke
You don't need a Lambda for this. Refactor your serverless
app.
Raphael Manke
Raphael Manke is a full-stack developer and consultant with five years of experience in developing serverless applications in the AWS cloud. AWS CDK changed his way of defining infrastructure as code dramatically and he likes to share his experiences and challenges along the way.
Waldemar Hummer
LocalStack: Turbocharging feedback loops for developing
AWS cloud apps
This talk provides a hands-on introduction to LocalStack - the leading platform for developing and testing cloud applications entirely on your local machine.
LocalStack provides a high-fidelity emulator for some 90+ AWS services, running in a local Docker container. The popular open source project (52k+ Github stars, 230+ million downloads) is today considered a "must-have" in the toolbox of AWS cloud developers around the globe.
This interactive session covers live coding to showcase common use cases, different settings for local debugging of Lambdas and containerized apps (e.g., ECS), as well as advanced features that can radically improve team collaboration.
We will also glance over the large ecosystem of tools that LocalStack natively integrates with (from IaC frameworks like Terraform or CDK, to application toolkits like Serverless, SAM, or Copilot) as well as some of the enterprise features in the platform.
The session will close with a short peek into the architectural internals of LocalStack, as well as an outlook on some of the exciting features on the roadmap.
Waldemar Hummer
Waldemar is co-founder and CTO of LocalStack, where he and his team are building the world-leading platform for local cloud development, based on the hugely popular open source framework with 45k+ stars on Github. Prior to founding LocalStack, Waldemar has held several engineering and management roles at startups as well as large international companies, including Atlassian (Sydney), IBM (New York), and Zurich Insurance. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from TU Vienna.
Lukas Pour
Database Freedom - How to migrate from Oracle to Aurora
PostgreSQL Live
I want to showcase how we migrated a customer (financial industry—credit card processing) from on-prem Oracle DB to AWS Multi-Region and Multi-AZ Aurora PostgreSQL, live without downtime, using AWS DMS and SCT. The database held credit card transactions and was highly critical. Besides that, we achieved better performance and lower cost of the solution. I can show architecture diagrams, SCT, and DMS usage.
Lukas Pour
I am a senior AWS Architect with more than 14 years of
commercial experience in the IT field, both Windows
and Linux 🐧. I have been working with AWS full-time
for more than eight years.
I have led multiple large-scale
migrations/modernization projects to AWS during that
time.
I am interested in security, automation, and
cost-effective cloud ☁️ usage patterns.
My goal is always to showcase the real business
benefits of cloud usage.
Organizers
The brains behind the AWS Community Day 2024
From the community for the community. The people listed below are organizing this year's are organizing this year's event.
Gloria Gräser
AWS User Group Zuerich
Fast Lane Switzerland
Rinon Belegu
AWS User Group Zuerich
Legendary IT
Daniele Madama
AWS User Group Ticino
Claranet Switzerland
Contact
Do you have any questions for us?
If you are missing any information about the Community Day or if you would like to contact us, e.g. about sponsoring contact us please contact either Rinon Belegu or Gloria Gräser.
Rinon Belegu
Gloria Gräser
Bus stop : Dübendorferstrasse : Nr. 748
Parking: 5 CHF for the whole day
Platinum Sponsor
Gold Sponsors
Community Sponsor
Lanyard Sponsor
