At Relout, we keep our consultants up to date with industry trends, so we fully covered their trip to AWS Community Day Poland. It was focused on real AWS use cases.
The event took place at Multikino Zlote Tarasy and gave more practical insights than the bigger, vendor driven AWS Cloud Day Warsaw. The sessions were hands on and showed real projects and results.
Gerard, Daniel and Adam joined 10 sessions. Some were stronger than others, but the trip gave clear value. Below is a short summary of 3 top picks with direct comments from our team.
The sessions are presented in random order.
1. Stop the Networking Chaos! Secure & Optimize AWS Networking with Centralized Architecture
As organizations scale their cloud environments, decentralized networking can lead to inefficiencies, security risks, and increased operational costs. This session demystifies the power of Centralized Network Infrastructure on AWS, focusing on how AWS Network Firewall and Centralized VPC Endpoints can transform cloud security and connectivity.
Speaker: Marcin Winnik
[Daniel] It was a very informative session, but on a very high level. The company had multiple duplicated resources when it comes to networking (VPC in particular) which was a mess to govern and they have decided to centralize networking for easier management. In the QA part after it, someone suggested more improvements to the setup presented which earned a nod from the speaker.
2. AWS Audit (original title: Audyt AWS – na co patrzeć, czego szukać)
Not every driver can operate a lorry. Not every doctor can operate a goldfish. Not every developer, despite having multiple years of experience knows how to secure cloud infrastructure that he learnt nothing of in college, so he learns on your prod environment 🙂
Speaker: Michal Brygidyn
Recommendations:
- Amazon Q has great potential to give you instant feedback on your infrastructure compliance, security and configuration
[Adam] Was really curious about this one and ended up pleasantly surprised when the presenter went over areas of audit scenarios. Turns out, we’re faring way better than the “average” companies on the market, and overall it felt like watching a retrospective of our last couple of years making improvements to AWS org setup. Well done!
Also, Amazon Q is apparently way more of a thing that I personally gave it credit for, definitely something I’d like to have the team tinker around with more in the coming months.
3. Implementing compliance in AWS with Terraform: Practical Steps That Work
Implementing compliance doesn’t have to feel like voodoo magic (though some vendors might make it seem that way). As the creator of the widely used open-source Terraform AWS modules, provisioned billions of times, and the newer compliance-focused project compliance.tf, I’ve spent years helping teams build secure, compliant AWS infrastructure without burning out.
In this talk, I’ll share practical, hands-on ways to implement compliance in modern cloud environments using Terraform. We’ll look at how to assess your readiness for frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 using cloud-native tools and open-source projects like Prowler, SteamPipe, and Checkov. I’ll then show how to write Terraform code to meet specific controls.
Packed with real-world examples and reusable code, this session is perfect for anyone responsible for cloud infrastructure who wants to achieve compliance right from day one or retroactively.
Speaker: Anton Babenko
Recommendations:
- Check out compliance.tf, Checkov and Prowler – very useful tools and frameworks for code compliance and more
- Review especially the last slide (anti patterns) from this presentation for awareness
- Takeaways, slides, notes:
[Adam] Was really surprised to see that Mr Babenko himself had a panel during this conference (due to lack of checking beforehand) and it was a pleasure to watch. Production grade, security hardened Terraform modules are always a tough nut to crack properly, and having access to community forged ones is definitely a wonderful thing to have.
