70+ attendees, 4 topics, 3 hours – that is how the first Meetup of AWS User Group Belgrade looks like in numbers.
Additional 49 people watching us Live via YouTube:
As this was our first meetup we had to balance between zero to max knowledge in the audience and to prepare everyone for our next meetups and what kind of a format we plan to take. In general every meetup will have a general topic – July/Security, September/Relational Databases, December/Gaming, …




That’s why we started with intro on re:Invent and AWS Summits. Using their own videos and photos, Strahinja Keselj from User Group Novi Sad, Dejan Krsmanovic and Milos Dobrosavljevic walked through these conferences / we talked about labs/workshops, food, travelling, expenses … trying to explain the value of taking an expensive trip to US or maybe choosing AWS Summit Berlin which is free, close to Belgrade and perfect for English speaking audience.


Then Milos Dobrosavljevic made 5 min lab and created static web site https://awsugbelgrade.com using S3, Cloud Front and Certificate Manager. We will work on this site in every meetup and add new tech to it. Get ready for Amplify and other Frontend beasts.

Next hour and a half I pushed the audience to the limit by running through all announcements of re:Invent 2018 and post announcements. It is a long run for a mixed experienced audience because I explained every piece of tech related to every announcements.


Last 45 minutes we talked about User Group and what can UG do for the IT community. Mic was open and we had several nice discussions regarding HSM, Outposts, dealing with latest tech, education, …



So, it was great, I’m happy and I hope we managed to light the fire đŸ™‚
See you in July at our next meetup on Security – right after re:inforce conference with full report on it and several cool presentations.