Meetup Format Roadmap

Over the last few years, this community has had a diverse set of audiences for all the different types of meetups we have done across different locations. While the primary focus was working professionals when the group started out with Raj Chilakapati & Krishna driving most of the initiatives, the last couple of years has seen an increasing number of college going youth joining in to our sessions thanks to the efforts Kapil Dutta has put in ever since he became the co-organizer. Slowly but steadily the community has been growing with folks from several different domains & experience levels.

Having said this, I have felt that there has been a lack of clarity on which meetup is useful to whom as we often get questions like “I’m new to AWS, will this meetup help me?” and sometimes “Is this useful for someone working on AI/ML?”. And to be honest, given the extremely vast breadth and depth of services that AWS has, it becomes extremely difficult to cater to everyone at the same time.

As part of an initiative to make this community more organized and professional, we have decided to categorize our meetups into different levels and different topic distinctions so that everyone can easily understand if a particular meetup will make sense to them or not. And for those of you who are already chuckling looking at this, yes, you are right, it is inspired from AWS re:Invent session categorization formula.

There will be 4 types of splits in terms of primary categorization. Each split will then have secondary categorization based on the domain topics. The primary categorizations are: Level 100 meant for entry into AWS, Level 200 meant for beginners on AWS, Level 300 for intermediate users and Level 400 for advanced/in-depth topics and use cases. The secondary categorizations will be split domain wise for example, 101, 201, 301, 401 etc will be topics around general compute and 102, 202, 302, 304 will be another domain like serverless compute etc. Below are the categorization in more detail.

(Level 100): This level is meant for those who are absolutely new to AWS and the cloud ecosystem. The topics we will be covering in this category will be around ‘what is the cloud’, ‘what is AWS’, overview of AWS services, market comparisons, how to get started with AWS etc. If you are yet to take the cloud plunge or have heard much about the cloud but don’t know where to start, these sessions are meant to give you that starting impetus which will hopefully set you up into a fantastic career in the AWS cloud ecosystem.

(Level 200): This level is for those who already have a fair idea about what AWS is and what the potential and use cases of AWS is but are yet to actually work hands on with any service on AWS. The topics you will find here will most likely include individual service details like What is EC2 and how to setup and configure an EC2, other services like Load Balancers, S3, Elastic File System, Virtual Private Cloud etc. and their configuration. We hope to have hands on lab sessions during these kind of meetups so that you can get first hand exposure to how to run AWS services.

(Level 300): The intermediate level is assuming that you already have a very good understanding of core AWS services and how to set up and configure services on your own and now looking for ways to improve the efficiency of these processes and understand the detailed inner workings, gain tips & cover gaps in your existing knowledge. The topics will include use cases and implementation scenarios, multi-service, multi-tier architectures, DevOps processes, serverless implementations, AI&ML service integrations & improvements and all of them hopefully mixed in with hands on labs.

(Level 400): The Advanced or Expert level is for those whom if you wake up in the middle of their sleep and ask them to name the services, regions, AZs or a particular feature of a service will look at you annoyingly for waking them up for such silly questions and tell you which link to click on to find the answer or give you the CLI command and then go back to sleep. Jokes aside, this will include in-depth planning, migration, implementation & deployment scenarios and how large organizations make use of AWS services efficiently to power their businesses with millions of users. For these meetup sessions, we expect to bring in industry experts who have been there, done that so that you can get access to some industry best practices to implement in your own organizations and processes.

Subcategories

The subcategories are basically topics or domains in each level, they should essentially remain the same throughout all levels, for example 101, 201, 301 & 401 will have the same topic but at different levels of detail. We have come up with a few initial sub categories but will be expanding this and adding more as and when we will have more speakers in each area. With 159 services as of today, it is quite difficult to have a separate sub category for each service. Below are some example of subcategorization which we intend to use. Health warning: this will change over time!

I sincerely hope that this will make it easier for everyone to decide if a particular meetup will be helpful for them or not and help meet your expectations. We are working on quite a few things within the community to improve the experience of the attendees and help deliver knowledgeable sessions that you can actually use with your line of work or help you move into a career in the AWS cloud ecosystem. If you would like to stay updated on all the happenings, please do take a moment to fill up the newsletter subscription form below. Thank you for taking the time and stopping by!