14:00 - 14:45

AI&DATA-02

From MacBook to Bedrock: Lessons from building an AI assistant

Room: Yasmin-I | Time: 14:00

Training an AI-powered Slackbot sounds straightforward until your model starts ignoring half of the data you feed it. At AWS User Group Vienna, we built OTTO, a Slack-integrated AI assistant, fine-tuned using the open source tool InstructLab and deployed on Amazon Bedrock. But as we scaled up, we ran into real-world bottlenecks: training on MacBooks was slow, retrieval was inconsistent, and debugging was way harder than expected. This talk goes beyond the ‘perfect AI stack’ and into the messy reality of model tuning, infrastructure choices, and the unexpected lessons we learned. If you’re working on AI-powered assistants (or just curious how fast things can go sideways), this talk will provide practical insights into our approach, with focus on cost efficiency, and what we learned on the way.

Linda Mohamed 🇦🇹

AWS Hero, Chairwoman Förderverein AWS Community DACH & AWS User Group Leader

Philipp Bergsmann 🇦🇹

EMEA Black Belt, Managed OpenShift @RedHat

OPS-02

Breaking the cloud: Finding and exploiting misconfigurations in AWS

Room: Yasmin-II | Time: 14:00

Misconfigurations are among the most common security gaps in cloud environments, often leading to severe breaches. In this session, we’ll dive into the world of AWS penetration testing, focusing on identifying and exploiting these misconfigurations to understand their impact. We’ll cover: Where to start with AWS pentesting, including key attack surfaces. Tools like CloudFox, Prowler, Pacu and others to discover vulnerabilities and insecure configurations. Real-world privilege escalation examples to demonstrate common attack paths.

Victoria Shutenko 🇺🇦

AWS Community Builder, Security engineer & Penetration Tester @TechMagic

OPS-05

High quality infrastructure (as Code) with AWS CDK

Room: Yasmin-III | Time: 14:00

Ideas, patterns, workflows, and tools that successful teams utilize within their infrastructure definitions and deployment pipelines to build robust cloud applications. This talk also explains why AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) can be a good choice (and when it might not be) for defining cloud resources. This talk focuses on AWS CDK and some CloudFormation related topics, but you should get many ideas out of this talk even if you use some other infrastructure as code tooling (like Terraform). Basic knowledge of infrastructure as code concepts recommended for attending this session.

Ari Palo 🇫🇮

AWS Community Builder & Lead Technologist @AlmaMedia