AWS re:Invent 2025 - Empowering communities - create fun events on AWS services (DEV344)

Empowering Communities: Creating Fun Events on AWS Services

Overview

This presentation showcases how the AWS user group community in Brazil leveraged AWS services to build a scalable, secure, and flexible platform for organizing and managing community events. The speakers, Priscilla Rau and Dendi, share their journey from a simple MVP to a production-ready architecture, highlighting the benefits and technical details of their solution.

Challenges and MVP

• The user groups in Brazil faced numerous challenges in organizing events, including managing tasks, processes, and multiple platforms.
• To address these challenges, they created a simple MVP using AWS Amplify, Amazon S3, API Gateway, and EC2 to quickly test and validate their idea.
• The initial MVP was intentionally simple, but the speakers recognized the need for better scalability, security, and flexibility as more communities joined the platform.

Collaborative Community Effort

• Recognizing the talent within their developer community, the team decided to collaborate with other user groups in Brasilia, Goiânia, São Bento, and others to create a more robust solution together.
• This collaborative approach guided the architecture and helped the team understand the specific needs of the community.

Production-Ready Architecture

The speakers then presented the production-ready architecture built on AWS, which includes the following components:

Domain and Content Delivery

• Amazon Route 53 for hosting the domain and managing DNS
• Amazon CloudFront for content delivery and low-latency access globally
• AWS WAF for security, protecting the application from malicious requests

Backend and API

• Amazon ECS Fargate for running the backend API, deployed across multiple Availability Zones
• Application Load Balancer for distributing requests across Fargate tasks
• Amazon Aurora for the database layer, providing improved resiliency and availability
• Amazon ECR for storing container images
• Amazon SNS and SES for notifications and email communications

Observability and Monitoring

• Amazon CloudWatch for metrics, alarms, and log ingestion

Benefits and Impact

• The platform allows the user groups to simplify event management, reducing the need for multiple platforms and over 20 different inputs.
• The speakers estimate a time savings of more than 70 hours per year, allowing the community to focus on engaging participants and having fun.
• The platform, named "Party Community," provides a centralized console for managing all events, community days, and meetups.

Community Engagement and Collaboration

• The user group community in Brazil is diverse, with many young female developers contributing as volunteers.
• The project has a GitHub repository where the code is shared, and the team encourages others to contribute and collaborate.
• The speakers invite the audience to connect with them, join their meetups, and support the platform by providing ideas or coding skills to expand its functionality.