Melbourne Serverless Meetup Group event for April 2026

Note - NEW location for this month only at the AWS Builder Studio!

IMPORTANT - the list of attendees will be provided the day before to security. Just go up the stairs / escalator to level 1 and check with your Photo ID to security.

Please get in touch ASAP if you would like to talk at a future event, send us an email at Melbourne(at)serverless.org.au for more info!

First time speakers are more than welcome and we can provide you assistance if you need with your presentation beforehand. Please reach out Melbourne(at)serverless.org.au.

It can be a regular talk, lightning talk, demo, workshop, whatever is your thing our community will love it - as long as it is serverless related!

Venue: AWS Builder Studio, Level 1, 555 Collins St. Melbourne

📅 Agenda 📅

5:30 PM - Doors Open!

6:00 PM - Welcome from the organizers / housekeeping

6:05 PM - "Changing the engine mid-flight: A startup data pivot" - By Susan Brander, CTO Kaleida

What happens when your startup’s data model is held together with duct tape, but you still have to fly the plane, ship features, and act cool about it?
Startups move fast, and sometimes that means making the best architecture decisions you can, and being utterly wrong because you don’t yet fully understand the domain you’re building for.
At Kaleida, we chose DynamoDB as the cheapest way to get our product off the ground quickly, pushing relational logic into separate tables and thinking we’d gotten it right and assuming if we hadn’t that we’d clean it up later (if we survived).
SPOILER!
We survived and thrived! Later came around fast, and it looked like:
- bloated documents

• Relational logic spread across tables
• Queries dragging us down

We knew we’d modelled it wrong, and that not changing it soon would only multiply the difficulties in the future. So, mid-flight, we changed engines.

This talk is a candid case study of what it takes to evolve your architecture under pressure:

• found our real data inside our current data
• Pivoted to a One Table design
• Pulled off a zero-downtime migration
• Did it all while shipping features and pretending we weren’t panicking.

If your team is battling tech debt, scaling pains, a data model that no longer reflects reality, (or you just want to hear about someone else’s war wounds) then come along.

6:35 PM - Pizza & Networking

7:00 PM - "Let the Agent Read the Boring Reports: AI-Powered Database Auditing for PROTECTED Compliance on AWS" - By Christina Chen, Senior DevOps Engineer, Mantel Group

Nobody reads CSV audit reports. But under Australia's IRAP PROTECTED framework, organisations must continuously monitor and evidence database user activity — and assessors want proof.
This talk builds a two-stage event-driven pipeline: Lambda extracts MySQL RDS user activity to S3, then a Strands Agent on Bedrock autonomously assesses findings against ISM controls, and generates assessor-ready output

7:30 PM - Networking and finish the Pizza!

8:00 PM - Doors Close, see you next time!