We want sessions that are practical, specific and grounded in real experience. The best talks at AWS Community Day Kenya are not overviews of what a service does they are honest accounts of what it is actually like to build with it. A strong submission gives attendees something they can take away and use: an approach they had not considered, a mistake they can now avoid, a pattern they can apply in their own work. Sessions must not be product pitches or sales presentations. Sponsors are welcome to submit technical talks and will be evaluated on exactly the same criteria as every other submission.

SESSION FORMATS

We accept the following session types:

1. Technical session (30 min) — a focused talk on a specific technology, architecture, tool or use case. One or two speakers, slide-based or hybrid.
2. Technical demo (20 min) — a live demonstration of a working system built on AWS. Less slides, more terminal. Real code and real architecture on screen.
3. Paper presentation (20 min) — a structured academic or research-style talk suited to students, researchers and academic practitioners presenting work on cloud, AI/ML, security or adjacent fields.
4. Lightning talk (10 min) — one sharp insight, one surprising lesson or one strong opinion. No padding, no preamble. A great starting point for first-time speakers.
5. Panelist (open application) — we curate our panel compositions ourselves. Submit your perspective and background and we will reach out if your profile fits a panel we are building. Do not submit as a panel organiser.

TRACKS

Sessions should fall within one of our eight tracks:

1. AI & Machine Learning — generative AI, Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, MLOps, responsible AI, LLMs, AI built for African contexts and real-world machine learning in production.
2. Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure — Well-Architected Framework, serverless, containers, EKS, Lambda, microservices, cost optimisation, migrations and modernisation.
3. DevOps & Developer Experience — CI/CD, infrastructure as code, Terraform, AWS CodePipeline, GitHub Actions, platform engineering, developer productivity and SRE.
4. Security & Compliance — IAM, zero trust, GuardDuty, Security Hub, threat detection, data privacy and compliance in Kenya and across Africa.
5. Data & Analytics — data lakes, Redshift, Athena, Glue, Kinesis, real-time streaming, data engineering and business intelligence on AWS.
6. Women in Tech & Inclusion — career journeys in cloud, building inclusive teams, mentorship, leadership and navigating the tech industry in East Africa.
7. Startups & Builders — building on AWS, SaaS architecture, AWS Activate, scaling from MVP to production and lessons from building for African markets.
8. Cloud for Impact — AWS in education, healthcare, agriculture, financial services and government. Sustainability, green cloud and digital public infrastructure.

LEVELS OF EXPERTISE

Tag your session with one of the following levels:

1. Introductory — no prior cloud or AWS experience assumed. Suited to students and those new to the field.
2. Intermediate — some cloud or AWS experience assumed. Aimed at practitioners actively building or managing workloads.
3. Advanced — production-level experience expected. Real architecture decisions, real tradeoffs and hard-won lessons from systems under load.

Please be accurate about the level you select. Attendees use this to choose between parallel sessions and a mislabelled session is a frustrating experience for everyone in the room.Write for practitioners who build things and want to get better at building things.

CODE OF CONDUCT

AWS Community Day Kenya 2026 (Pwani Edition) is committed to a safe, inclusive and harassment-free experience for every participant, regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, ethnicity, religion or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. As a speaker you are expected to uphold these standards in your session content, your slides, your demos and your interactions with attendees and fellow speakers. Sessions that demean, stereotype or exclude any group of people will not be scheduled regardless of their technical quality.If you experience or witness anything that violates this standard, please contact the organizing team . All reports are treated confidentially and every report is taken seriously. By submitting a session you agree to abide by this Code of Conduct and, if accepted, to deliver your session in the spirit in which it was submitted.