AWS London Well-Architected User Group March Meetup!

Hi Architects,

Welcome to our the second AWS London Well-Architected User Group Meetup!!! 🥳🥳🥳

Due to the huge demand we saw for our inaugural meetup we have gone bigger with a new venue.

Dragon Hall Trust, 17 Stukeley Street, London WC2B 5LT

The AWS London Well-Architected Meetup is the latest chapter in the most popular AWS Meetup group globally.

At each meetup we cover off various pillars of AWS best-practice in detail including insights from industry leaders that specialise in the Well-Architected Framework.

We'll be announcing more speakers and topics over the coming weeks.

Speakers

• The Philosophy Behind Well-Architected
  Philip Fitzsimons (Fitz) - Ex-AWS - Co-authored the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The Well-Architected Framework started at AWS but has since been adopted by every major cloud vendor and beyond. Why did it resonate so widely?

In this session, Fitz, who led the Well-Architected initiative at AWS from the beginning, explores the philosophy behind the framework, how it was intended to shape architectural thinking, and the mistakes teams commonly make when applying it.

Drawing on lessons from seeing thousands of real architectures, he will explain how to approach Well-Architected reviews in a way that actually improves systems rather than just generating checklists.

• Running your first Well-Architected Review: A Live Walkthrough
  James Harding - Technical CSM - Green Custard

Curious about how a Well-Architected Review works in practice? In this session we'll run a live walkthrough using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, showing how to define a workload, answer the review questions, identify High Risk Issues and move on to an actionable improvement plan.

• Building Your Infrastructure: "Self-Hosted vs. Managed"
  Mykola Boiko - Backend Developer - Ultralytics

What does it really cost to build and operate your own infrastructure? Mykola Boiko shares real-world lessons from scaling a globally distributed AI platform using self-hosted infrastructure before gradually migrating services to AWS. Through stories of building replication, caching, observability, and multi-region reliability from scratch, the session reveals the hidden operational complexity and costs behind running everything yourself. The journey highlights key principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework including Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Operational Excellence, and Cost Optimisation and shows why managed cloud services can dramatically reduce operational burden while improving scalability and resilience.

More speakers to be announced soon.

So come join us at 7pm for a 7.30pm start, including drinks, snacks and friendly networking after our talks :-)

***NB: No entry to the building after 7.30pm.***