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
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
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

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

Session Formats

Regular Sessions: 45 minutes (inclusive of Q&A)
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 — students, 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

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 Surat 2026

Speaking slot at a growing, engaged community event

Networking with builders, architects, and practitioners

Your talk featured on AWS User Group Surat channels

Meals and refreshments throughout the day

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