AWS Community Day Midwest 2026

June 24, 2026

AWS Community Day

Midwest | Indianapolis

Discover our annual event focused on inspiring action, connecting communities, and creating opportunities.

Keynote Speaker

Corey Quinn

Corey Quinn is the founder and chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, where he helps companies understand, optimize, and reduce their AWS spending. Quinn is an outspoken industry commentator and widely recognized for translating complex cloud billing and infrastructure topics into clear, often humorous insights through his newsletter “Last Week in AWS,” his podcast “Screaming in the Cloud,” and his active presence on social media.

Keynote: "If I Were Starting Over"

AWS instance pricing used to drop 10% between generations. The C7 to C8 jump costs 7% more. Nobody announced that change. I checked. I've mass-produced bad AWS decisions for ten years and mass-produced opinions about them for nearly as long. If I were mass-producing them starting today, I'd do almost none of it the same way.
This is the talk I wish existed when I started: which best practices aged into traps, what the pricing model actually rewards (it's not efficiency), why the community team that should be onboarding you got laid off, and what Vercel figured out that a trillion-dollar company apparently couldn't. It's useful whether you're fifteen years deep or fifteen minutes in.

Full schedule coming soon!

Session Topics

AgentCore execution: Deep Dive
Adaptations of a Self-Taught Dev: Learning CompSci the Hard (and Fun) Way
Active Career Management
Agentic AI in the Contact Center: Amazon Connect
Agentic Sprawl to Enterprise Spool: A First Look at the AWS Agent Registry
Amazon Aurora DSQL.
Approved Patterns for Speed & Security in AWS
Architecting Cloud-Native Critical Systems: Patterns for Resilience, Availability, and Scale
Beyond Vibe Coding: How One AWS Partner Built an AI Engineering Platform on Kiro
Bill shock? Cost savings beginner to expert
Build Your Own AI Coaching Agent: Real-Time Voice Training with Nova Sonic and Strands Agents
Building Real-Time Financial Risk Detection Systems on AWS Using Multi-Source AI
Building Testable Serverless Applications with the Hexagonal Architecture
CloudFront Deep Dive in 2026 – Tap into the flat-rate pricing and its many hidden features
Cloud-Native e-Discovery with AI on AWS
Decoupling microservices with Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Deploy Green, Verify, Promote: Blue/Green Releases with API Gateway & Lambda
Dungeons & Dragons Meets AI: From Hallucinations to Spec-Driven Systems on AWS
From On-prem to cloud: Practical lessons learnt After Migration
From Zero to POC in 30 Days: Building an AI Agent Platform on Amazon Quick Suite

Governing Education Data in the Cloud: FERPA, Privacy, and Analytics on AWS
IAM Drift Is Quietly Killing Your Cloud Security
Kiro and the storm
Kiro IDE: Ideas to Production with Vibe Coding, Specs, and Agentic AI!
Lessons Learned Building a Highly Available Serverless Client Portal
Live Data Replication from On-Prem to AWS for Safe Legacy Modernization
Multi-Cloud Without the Mess: AWS Architecture Decisions That Actually Hold Up
Networking as a Career – not the TCP/IP kind
No Big Bang Theory – A 2-way Data Synchronization Solution
On-Prem to FSx ONTAP: A Real-World Massive Data Migration Story
Operating Data Pipelines at Scale: Lessons from a Metadata-Driven Architecture
Past, Present, Future: How AI Is Rewriting All of It
Reclaim Your Cloud: Intro to Cloud Custodian
Running LLM Inference On Kubernetes: A Reliable Path From Cluster To First Prompt (EKS)
Serverless at Scale: The Hidden Limits of AWS Lambda and How to Design Around Them
Skip the Middleman: Direct, Secure UI-to-Agent Communication with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Talk to AWS: AI Operations with the AWS MCP Server
Tell that Story!
The Work Behind Your Workload
Using Nova Sonic 2 for bidirectional speech
Wranglers of The Lost App

About the Event

AWS Community Day | Midwest is an annual one-day, user-run AWS technical conference that is planned, organized, and delivered by AWS user group community leaders (much like a “Meetup of Meetups”). The goal of the Community Day is to facilitate the exchange of information amongst the AWS user community. The presentations are all given by speakers who are fellow AWS users sharing knowledge with their peers.

This year’s event will be the 8th annual Community Day | Midwest and will take place in Indianapolis, Indiana at the Hyatt Regency Downtown Indianapolis.

Keynote Highlights

Get inspired by thought leaders who will share their experiences and visions. These sessions aim to motivate and empower all attendees.

Networking Opportunities

Connect with peers, sponsors, and speakers. Build relationships that lead to collaboration and invite new solutions to our shared challenges.

Midwest AWS User Groups

Aside from the annual Community Days, many user groups organize sessions on AWS topics throughout the year. Find your local Midwest user group and get involved!

Premier Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

Bronze Sponsors

Meet Our Inspiring Speakers

Discover the insights and experiences our speakers bring to the table, ready to inspire and educate.

Propose a Talk

As a volunteer-led event, we rely on our fellow AWS user group members to provide educational information for attendees and count on them to not use this speaking opportunity to pitch their products and services. We appreciate your time and passion in preparing for your speaking session!

June 24, 2026