Melbourne AWS User Group #160 - June 2026

🎉 Melbourne AWS User Group – June Meetup 🎉

📅 Wednesday, 24 June
📍 NAB Events Hub – 395 Bourke Street, Melbourne
⏰ Food at 6:00 pm, talks from 6:30 pm (with live stream)

Join us for our June meetup, featuring two lightning talks and a full technical presentation covering community contribution, generative AI, and cloud-native security.

This month also celebrates the AWS community speaking journey. Sanjana Kailash will deliver her first-ever public presentation, while Bharat Wadhwa returns to present after beginning his own public speaking journey at a Melbourne AWS User Group event.

This month’s lineup features:
• Matthew Merriel giving a behind-the-scenes look at how the Melbourne AWS User Group’s regular “What’s New in AWS” segment is prepared—and how other volunteers can get involved.
• Sanjana Kailash making her first-ever public presentation, demonstrating an automated market-intelligence pipeline built with Amazon Bedrock, retrieval-augmented generation, and AWS-native services.
• Bharat Wadhwa presenting a cloud-native approach to malware protection for Amazon S3 using Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection. Bharat also gave his first public presentation at a Melbourne AWS User Group event, making this a great example of where taking that first step can lead.

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

The event will also be live-streamed on YouTube:
👉 https://melb.awsug.org.au/live

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🗓️ Agenda
6:00 pm – Food & Socialising
6:30 pm – Introductions
6:40 pm – What’s New in AWS
6:55 pm – Preparing the “What’s New in AWS” Segment (Level 100); Speaker: Matthew Merriel
7:10 pm – RAG to Riches: AI-Powered Market Intelligence on Amazon Bedrock (Level 200); Speaker: Sanjana Kailash
7:25 pm – Intelligent Malware Protection Using AWS GuardDuty (Level 200); Speaker: Bharat Wadhwa
7:55 pm – Marketplace (Who’s Hiring)
8:00 pm – Networking + Close

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🎤 Talk Details
Preparing the “What’s New in AWS” Segment
Speaker: Matthew Merriel
Level: 100
Format: Lightning Talk
“What’s New in AWS” is a regular part of Melbourne AWS User Group meetups—but how is the segment put together?
Matthew will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the process used to find, shortlist, and prepare recent AWS announcements for presentation at the meetup.
This session is designed to help volunteers understand what is involved and make it easier for more community members to take on the segment at future events. No previous speaking experience is required.

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RAG to Riches: AI-Powered Market Intelligence on Amazon Bedrock
Speaker: Sanjana Kailash
Level: 200
Format: Lightning Talk
What if a strategy team never had to manually scan more than 50 data sources again?
In this lightning talk, Sanjana will walk through how she built a fully automated AI-powered market-intelligence pipeline using Amazon Bedrock, retrieval-augmented generation, and AWS-native services.
The solution transforms more than five hours of Monday-morning manual research into a polished briefing delivered directly to inboxes—with no manual effort required.
This will also be Sanjana’s first public presentation, and we’re excited to welcome another new speaker to the Melbourne AWS community.

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Intelligent Malware Protection Using AWS GuardDuty
Speaker: Bharat Wadhwa
Level: 200
Format: Full Presentation
This presentation showcases a cloud-native malware-protection solution for Amazon S3 using Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection.
The solution replaces legacy antivirus approaches with intelligent, event-driven malware detection and automated security workflows.
Bharat will explore how this approach can improve scalability, operational efficiency, and security visibility across AWS environments.
Bharat also began his public speaking journey at a Melbourne AWS User Group event and now returns with a full technical presentation.

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🙌 Could This Be the Start of Your Speaking Journey?

This month, Sanjana will take the stage for her first-ever public presentation. Bharat also began his speaking journey at a Melbourne AWS User Group meetup and is now returning with a full technical session.
Every experienced speaker started with a first talk.
Whether you have an idea for a full presentation, a lightning talk, or would like to help prepare and present the “What’s New in AWS” segment, the organisers are happy to help you take that first step.

Speak to us at the meetup or submit an idea through our website:
👉 https://melb.awsug.org.au/speak/