Welcome to the next 2026 AWS Melbourne Well-Architected User Group Meetup!

Hi Architects, Welcome to our next AWS Melbourne Well-Architected User Group Meetup for 2026, including more exceptional speakers and topics! :-D At each meetup we covered off various pillars in detail, best-practices and insights from industry leaders that specialise in the Well-Architected Framework. And giving away drones, of course. Lots of drones. Please also note that AWS Security now requests a company name and company email where it is available. If you are a student, please list your institution and your student email address at that institution 👍 We'll be announcing more speakers on https://well-architected.me and previewing presentations during the coming weeks - our speakers and details this month include: Shilin Wu, Principal Solution Architect — VeloDB / Apache Doris Cost-Efficient Real-Time Analytics on AWS: Storage-Compute Separation with Apache Doris Real-time analytics have a reputation for being expensive — you pay for fast storage you barely use, and for compute that sits idle overnight. This session walks through VeloDB / Apache Doris's storage-compute separation architecture on AWS, showing how to push warm data down to S3 while keeping sub-second query latency on the data that matters. We'll round off with a live demo querying billions of rows against S3-backed storage, soattendees can see the latency-vs-cost trade-off in action rather than on a slide. Pankaj Reddy, Head of Engineering - Simplicity KiwiSaver The next thing that matters (orientation theory continued..) The talk explores mental models for how an agent decides what matters next, and how that shapes its orientation before it acts. It connects this idea to the Well-Architected pillars of Operational Excellence, Reliability, Security, and Performance Efficiency, showing how better orientation can lead to more deliberate and effective agent behaviour. Mystery Speaker Generative AI Cost Optimisation Cost Optimisation is essential but with all the anecdotal stories of massive token budget blowouts, staying on top of Generative AI best-practices is essential to avoiding these scenarios. This month's menu will include: Pizzas Beer: Nastro Azzurro Wine: Big and red 🤤 NB: Please check in up the stairs from the ground floor to the Mezzanine Level. So come join us at 5:30 for a 6pm SHARP start, followed by beer, wine, pizza and friendly networking after our talks :-) Tired of Linkedin’s "thought leadership”, spam and advertising? Join https://well-architected.me/ , the AWS community built for architects, developers and cloud professionals. Connect with experienced AWS practitioners Preview upcoming AWS Meetups and relive past content Create and review beautiful AWS case studies in minutes Prepare for AWS certifications with curated quizzes Show your manager and reports you’re well-architected (Please note that by registering to attend you agree to your details being shared as and where required with Amazon Web Services and AWS Well-Architected User Group partners) in