My Experience of Speaking at First AWS Community Day - Vadodara

• Believe me when I say it, it is special to speak at an event in your hometown. Speaking at AWS Community Days, it cannot get bigger than this. It was a surreal feeling speaking at an event, in front of heroes and experts you admire. Thank you AWS User Group Vadodara for giving me this opportunity.

What's an AWS Community Day ?

• AWS Community Day conferences are community-led gatherings where the agenda and content are sourced, arranged, and presented by community leaders. They offer technical lectures, workshops, and demonstrations delivered by seasoned AWS users and business leaders from around the world.

• The peer-to-peer learning that Community Day events offer gives developers a place to learn about AWS in the way they prefer: from one another. They are occasions organised "by the community, for the community" in numerous ways.

• More Information about why you should attend a Community Day and Upcoming Community Days is available here.

How do you apply to be a Speaker at an AWS Community Day:

• As a core member of AWS User Group Vadodara, I came to know relatively early about the AWS Community Day coming to Vadodara for the first time.

• The planning of an AWS Community Day - Vadodara started about 2months ago. More information about my experience of organizing AWS CD Vad is shared here.

• In the beginning, I wasn't sure if I could speak at the event and also co-organize it with the other members. I enquired of Nilesh - (a community hero and leader of the AWS User Group), and he urged me to take part in both activities.

• Nilesh, Nirmal, Manan and others encourage me to submit a CFP application. I had a variety of subjects I could cover in my CFP application. "Serverless Analytics on AWS: Getting Started with EMR Serverless and MSK Serverless" was the title of the session that I eventually submitted.

Why did I choose this topic?

• At last year's re:invent conference, AWS revealed that four of its cloud-based analytics services, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon MSK, and Amazon Kinesis, are now accessible as serverless and on-demand services. I couldn't wait to use the services and provide my feedback. The services were recently made generally accessible, which was roughly two months ago.

• What better venue to share your knowledge and educate the audience about Serverless Analytics on AWS: EMR Serverless and MSK Serverless than presenting a session at AWS Community Day: Vadodara? I wanted to cover all four services but due to time constraints, I was only able to cover two of the four services, which included only their essential topics.

When did I know that my talk was accepted?

• Three or four weeks before the event, my talk was approved. It was not only a special but also a one-of-a-kind experience to speak at the event after my talk was accepted.

• The work of preparing a session wasn't actually that difficult because I've spoken at conferences and local meetups, right? Providing assistance to the team with event planning was a difficulty.

How was the Event Day experience?

• having karan Desai - Sr Solution Architect at AWS and Dhaval Nagar - AWS Serverless Hero start before me was a surreal experience, I literally had goosebumps. I was shaky when I first started, but eventually I was able to control it and deliver my talk. Although I have given many sessions and presentations in the past, this experience was unique.

• Initially, I had intended to spend 30 minutes on the session, but in the interest of time, I chose to highlight only a few crucial things and omit others. At our next AWS User Group Meetup, if there is enough interest, we will definitely run the complete session.

Why it is special to speak at AWS events:

• I love working on AWS and I love speaking about topics around Data & analytics, DevOps practices and Designing Applications. Thus it was a great opportunity to talk about something you have worked on and have thoroughly enjoyed doing.

Final Thoughts:

• Thank you to all the community members for the work you do. The AWS User Group members do everything because of their passion for the community and are not compensated in any ways by anyone involved in the event [AWS, Sponsors etc]. Hence a request, the next time you see a community driven event and if something goes wrong, be a little kind to the organizers and defer from talking to them rudely.

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I hope you had a great time at AWS Community day Vadodara. If you were at the Event, Let me know your experience in the comment section 👇 And if you haven't yet, make sure to follow me on below handles:

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