Melbourne AWS User Group #159 - May 2026

🎉 Melbourne AWS User Group – May Meetup 🎉

📅 Wednesday, 27 May
📍 NAB Events Hub – 395 Bourke Street, Melbourne
⏰ Food at 6:00 pm, talks from 6:30 pm (with live stream)

We're fresh from the excitement of AWS Summit Sydney, and the energy is still high! This month, we’re keeping that momentum alive by bringing a piece of the Summit back to Melbourne, alongside an inspiring journey of a cloud newcomer.

This month, we’re following the path from a first-ever cloud deployment to managing complex, event-driven IoT systems. Whether you’re just starting your cloud journey or looking to refine how you monitor production-scale data platforms, there’s something here for you.

This month’s lineup features:

• Nolan Cui, sharing his authentic "From Zero to First Deploy" journey, highlighting the lessons learned and mistakes made during his first steps into the cloud.
• Matthew Gillard, presenting an extended version of his AWS Summit Sydney talk on data observability, specifically focusing on practical patterns for event-driven IoT platforms.

A huge thank you to our sponsors: 🥇 Mantel Group – Gold Sponsor, 🥈 Cevo – Silver Sponsor, 🏛 NAB – Venue Sponsor.

The event will be live-streamed on YouTube as always.
🗓️ Agenda

• 6:00 pm – Food & Socialising
• 6:30 pm – Introductions
• 6:40 pm – What’s New in AWS
• 6:55 pm – From Zero to First Deploy: My AWS Beginner Journey (Level 100); Speaker: Nolan Cui
• 7:20 pm – Data Observability Without the Pain (Level 200); Speaker: Matthew Gillard
• 7:55 pm – Marketplace (Who’s Hiring)
• 8:00 pm – Networking + Close

🎤 Talk Details
From Zero to First Deploy: My AWS Beginner Journey
Speaker: Nolan Cui Level: 100
Nolan is still quite new to AWS, but his passion for cloud tech has led him from "just exploring" to building his first working cloud setup. In this lightning talk, he walks through his first hands-on experiences, the mistakes he made, and the valuable lessons he learned along the way. Nolan will also briefly touch on how he plans to apply these lessons by moving oward a fully serverless design for his upcoming real-world projects.

Data Observability Without the Pain: 3 practical patterns from a production IoT platform
Speaker: Matthew Gillard Level: 200
Modern IoT platforms are inherently data platforms. When events flow through APIs, queues, Lambda functions, and device networks, tracing a single event can become a nightmare. This fast-paced talk provides three practical observability patterns drawn from building and operating a production healthcare IoT platform that processes tens of thousands of events daily.

Using OpenTelemetry, AWS X-Ray, and Honeycomb, Matt will explore techniques for gaining visibility into asynchronous event pipelines and correlating activity across distributed services. You’ll leave with concrete patterns you can apply immediately to your own event-driven systems.

> Note: This is an extended, deep-dive version of the talk Matt is presenting at AWS Summit Sydney!

🙌 Want to Speak at a Future Meetup?
We’re always looking for new speakers and believe everyone has an interesting talk waiting to be shared.

If you’d like to present at a future event, reach out at the meetup or via our website:
👉 https://melb.awsug.org.au/speak/