What We're Looking For

We want talks grounded in real experience. Production. Hands-on. Honest.

Tell us:

• What you built and why it mattered
• How you deployed it and what you learned
• What broke, what you fixed, what surprised you
• What worked and what didn't
• The decisions you'd make differently
• The pattern or lesson that stuck with you

We're not interested in theoretical talks or vendor pitches. We're interested in you telling us what actually happened.

Acceptable Topics

• Production Incidents & War Stories — Deep dives into real problems you solved (the honest kind, not the sanitized kind)
• Containers & Orchestration — ECS, EKS, production scaling, real-world patterns
• Serverless — Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, lessons from running serverless at scale
• Databases — RDS, DynamoDB, choosing databases, migration stories, performance tuning
• DevOps & SRE — CI/CD, monitoring, observability, on-call rotation, incident response
• Infrastructure as Code — Terraform, CloudFormation, managing infrastructure at scale
• AI/ML on AWS — SageMaker, model training, deployment, MLOps in production
• Generative AI — Building with Bedrock, agents, RAG, LLMs in real applications
• Data & Analytics — Data pipelines, lake architecture, analytics implementation, cost optimization
• Security & Compliance — Real security challenges, IAM design, what actually works
• Cost Optimization — How you actually reduced your AWS bill (with numbers, if you can share)
• Cloud Migration — Legacy to cloud, real challenges, what you'd do differently
• Open Source on AWS — Tools you built, patterns you shared, community projects

The rule: If you've deployed it, implemented it, or debugged it in production, it's fair game.

Session Formats

• Regular Sessions: 30 minutes (inclusive of Q&A)
• Lightning Talks: 15 minutes
• Live Demos Encouraged: Show us what you built. Walk through the code. Show the failure and how you fixed it.

We recommend recording your demo in advance for a smooth delivery.

Target Audience

Our audience is builders — developers, DevOps engineers, architects, and practitioners from startups, small teams, and growing companies across tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

They're hands-on. They've had the 2am incident, the surprise AWS bill, and the "we need this in production by Friday" moment.

• Backend engineers and full-stack developers
• DevOps engineers and SRE practitioners
• Cloud and solution architects
• Data engineers and ML practitioners
• Engineering managers and tech leads
• Startup technologists and enterprise engineers
• Anyone hands-on with AWS

Talk to them. Assume they know what shipping looks like.

The talks that resonate here are grounded in real constraints — small teams, tight budgets, real tradeoffs. The unglamorous problems. The fixes that didn't make it to a blog post. That's what our audience shows up for — AI or not.

Expertise Level

• Beginner-friendly: Fundamentals, getting started, common pitfalls
• Intermediate: Best practices, architectural patterns, production considerations
• Advanced: Deep dives, optimization, emergent patterns, lessons from scale

Tell us what level your talk is, and we'll schedule it for the right audience.

What Makes a Strong Submission

✅ Specific — Not "scaling on AWS," but "how we scaled DynamoDB from 100 RCUs to 10k and what that taught us"

✅ Honest — What didn't work. What you'd do differently. Where you took risks.

✅ Grounded — Real numbers, real timelines, real constraints (not hypotheticals)

✅ Useful — Attendees walk out with something they can think about or try

✅ Vulnerable — You don't need to be perfect. Failure is often the most interesting story

We reject:

❌ Marketing pitches and vendor content

❌ Overly theoretical talks with no real deployment experience

❌ Talks that don't have substance (filler slides, no real insight)

Code of Conduct

All speakers and attendees agree to follow the AWS Community Code of Conduct.

In short: Be respectful and inclusive. No discrimination, harassment, or exclusion. We're here to learn from each other and build together.

Speaker Perks

Free full-day access to AWS Community Day Vadodara 2026

Speaking slot at a growing, engaged community event (700+ attendees)

Networking with builders, architects, and practitioners

Your talk featured on AWSUG Vadodara channels

Meals and refreshments throughout the day

Note: Travel and accommodation reimbursement are not provided; please make your own arrangements.