Agenda
07:30 - 08:30
Reception
Registration & Check-in
07:30 - 08:30
Expo Area
Breakfast & Networking
08:30 - 09:00
Auditorium
OPEN-100: Welcome to AWS Community Day South Africa 2025 Level 100 Welcoming & Opening
Speaker:
Hennie Francis ● Chief Executive Officer ● AWS Community South Africa
09:00 - 09:40
Auditorium
KEY-100: Roots & Rise - How the Mother City Sparked Amazon's Global Journey Level 100 Keynote
James Hickman
Country Manager - South Africa
Robert Koen
Managing Director - Sub-Saharan Africa
09:40 - 10:00
Movement
Movement & Networking
10:00 - 10:40
Session 1
The Intelligence Hub
Peter Wilson
Level 300
AI & Machine Learning
Agents for Change: GenAI
The Builders Garage
Lindelani Mbatha
Kobus Coetzee
Level 200
Developer Tools
Electrum’s Internal Developer Platform Journey for High-Velocity Software Delivery
The Core & Shield
Dayle Wheeler
Level 400
Security, Identity & Compliance
Cloud Security & Cryptography
The Edge Frontier
Patrick Cromwell
Level 100
Internet of Things (IoT)
Disrupting the Dial: How Cloud Tech is Doing to Radio What Uber Did to Taxis
The Disruption Zone
Abed Matini
Level 300
AI & Machine Learning
Making AI Smarter: Building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems on AWS
10:40 - 10:50
Movement
Movement & Networking
10:50 - 11:20
Session 2
The Intelligence Hub
Russell Young
Level 200
AI & Machine Learning
AI: Friend or Foe?
The Builders Garage
Liza Cullis
Level 200
Serverless
When Lambda Falls Short: Using Fargate for Longer Running Tasks
The Core & Shield
Ferdinand Williams
Level 200
Security, Identity & Compliance
Building a Resilient Culture in the Age of Human Risk Management (HRM+)
The Edge Frontier
Mark Govender
Level 100
Management & Governance
Full-Stack AWS Resilience: Veeam's Protection Platform
The Disruption Zone
Andrew Owens
Level 200
Networking & Content Delivery
Data Centres and Interconnection
11:20 - 11:30
Movement
Movement & Networking
11:30 - 12:10
Session 3
The Intelligence Hub
Roberto Arico
Level 100
AI & Machine Learning
The Fall and Rise of SaaS
The Builders Garage
Luis Guirigay
Level 300
Architecture
Unblocking Reliability: Performance & Load Testing at Scale on AWS
The Core & Shield
Jacob O'Brien
Level 200
Business Application
The Death of the Traditional SOC and SIEM as We Know It
The Edge Frontier
Julian Wood
Level 200
Serverless
Tools and Techniques for Serverless Developers
The Disruption Zone
Kimlynn Temple
Level 100
Entrepreneurship
From Cashless Frustration to Empowering a Nation
12:10 - 13:10
Lunch & Networking
Lunch & Networking
13:10 - 13:50
Session 4
The Intelligence Hub
Carike Botha
Level 200
Generative AI
Build applications with GitHub Copilot agent mode
The Builders Garage
Dale Nunns
Level 100
Front-End Web & Mobile
Duck Hunt: Retro gaming meets cutting-edge innovation in this quacking good tech adventure
The Core & Shield
Christo Goosen
Level 200
Security, Identity & Compliance
VibeDevSecOps
The Edge Frontier
Allan Pead
Level 200
Internet of Things (IoT)
Tiny Devices, Big Potential: .NET & C# in the AWS IoT Ecosystem
The Disruption Zone
Lucie Fink
Level 100
Entrepreneurship
Scaling Smarter with Thinkubate and Thinkroom GTM
13:50 - 14:00
Movement
Movement & Networking
14:00 - 14:30
Session 5
The Intelligence Hub
Jean-Pierre Pienaar
Level 200
AI & Machine Learning
AI-Powered Data Pipelines: Breaking Document Processing Bottlenecks
The Builders Garage
Yusuf Mayet
Level 200
Serverless
Build faster on AWS using Serverless, SAM and Q Developer
The Core & Shield
Lunga Newman
Level 100
Security, Identity & Compliance
Identity is the new Firewall
The Edge Frontier
Ntombizakhona Mabaso
Level 100
Front-End Web & Mobile
WordPress on AWS: From Zero to Scalable in Minutes
The Disruption Zone
Mahmoud Younes
Level 200
AI & Machine Learning
Building Enterprise AI Agents for Intelligent Applications
14:30 - 14:50
Afternoon Break
Afternoon Break & Networking
14:50 - 15:30
Session 6
The Intelligence Hub
Jonathan Leibbrandt
Level 200
AI & Machine Learning
Building Secure and Compliant Generative AI Applications on AWS Bedrock
The Builders Garage
Jacqui Muller
Level 100
Architecture
Using UiPath & AWS for Automated Assessment
The Core & Shield
Jason Bissict
Lisa Van Staden
Level 200
Security, Identity & Complience
Fool me once? Good. AWS deception done right
The Edge Frontier
Louise Schmidtgen
Level 300
Architecture
When Abstractions Leak: Distributed Systems Lessons from Cluster Membership Failures
The Disruption Zone
Sam Stodel
Level 100
Entrepreneurship
Growing to Greatness with Grindstone
15:30 - 15:40
Movement
Movement & Networking
15:40 - 16:20
Session 7
The Intelligence Hub
Douglas Day
Level 300
AI & Machine Learning
Snowflake Intelligence Unboxed: LLMs, Agents, and the Future of Data
The Builders Garage
Jano Barnard
Level 300
Architecture
Planet-Scale Workloads: Event-Driven Serverless Pipelines with AWS Batch
The Core & Shield
Jared Naude
Level 300
Security, Identity & Compliance
From Packets to Intel: Building your own Network Threat Feed
The Edge Frontier
Candice Grobler
Level 100
Networking & Content Delivery
Networking for People Who Hate Networking
The Disruption Zone
Ryan Blake
Level 200
Developer Tools
The Cloud Maturity Journey: Building for Scale, Speed, and Simplicity
16:20 - 16:30
Movement
Movement & Networking
16:30 - 17:10
Main Auditorium
VIP-100: Community as Code: Engineering Human Infrastructure Level 100 VIP Session
Speaker:
Mark Birch ● Founder ● TribeROI
17:10 - 17:30
Main Auditorium
Closing: Closing Ceremony & Prize Giving Level 100 Closing
Speaker:
Hennie Francis ● Chief Executive Officer ● AWS Community South Africa
17:30 - 18:30
Expo Area