Cape Town 2025
Event Partners
Diamond
Platinum
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Hennie Francis
Chief Executive Officer
AWS Community South Africa
James Hickman
Country Manager - South Africa
Amazon Web Services
Robert Koen
Managing Director - Sub-Saharan Africa
Amazon
Mark Birch
Founder
TribeROI
Abed Matini
Backend Developer
Ogilvy
Allan Pead
CTO and Microsoft MVP
AD Soft Systems
Andrew Owens
Technical Lead: Peering and Interconnection
Teraco
Candice Grobler
Founder
Candid Collab
Carike Botha
Software Development Consultant
iSolve Business Solutions
Christo Goosen
CTO
UW Warehouse
Dale Nunns
Technical Lead
DealX
Dayle Wheeler
Managing Director
SmartCrtypto
Douglas Day
Solutions Engineer
Snowflake Partner - datalab
Ferdinand Williams
Director of Sales
KnowBe4
Jacob O'Brien
Chief Executive Officer
Hakware
Jacqui Muller
Director
JPanda Solutions
Jano Barnard
Cloud Engineer
LuxCarta
Jared Naude
Head of Security
Synthesis
Jason Bissict
Team Lead
Thinkst Applied Research
Jonathan Leibbrandt
Solutions Architect
TrueMark
Jean-Pierre Pienaar
Head of Cloud Engineering
cloudandthings.io
Julian Wood
Principal Developer Advocate
Amazon Web Services
Kimlynn Temple
Founder & CEO
Tipped
Kobus Coetzee
Senior Cloud Engineer
Electrum Software
Lindelani Mbatha
Intermediate Platforms Engineer
Electrum Software
Lisa Van Staden
Software Engineer
Thinkst Applied Research
Liza Cullis
Platforms Engineer
Louise Schmidtgen
Software Engineer
Canonical
Lucie Fink
Chief Executive Officer
Thinkroom
Luis Guirigay
WW Head of Infrastructure Solutions
Amazon Web Services
Lunga Newman
Security Solutions Architect
Crayon
Mahmoud Younes
Senior Solutions Engineer
Couchbase
Mark Govender
Senior Systems Engineer
Veeam Software
Ntombizakhona Mabaso
Cloud Developer
Bamboo Charcoal
Patrick Cromwell
Chief Trouble Maker
Radio Cape Town
Peter Wilson
AI/ML Manager
Silicon Overdrive
Roberto Arico
Senior Solutions Architect
Elastic
Russell Young
Field Sales Engineer - Africa
Trend Micro
Ryan Blake
Head: Cloud Engineering
Capitec Bank
Sam Stodel
Project Manager
Grindstone
Yusuf Mayet
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
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