A review of AWS Summit London 2025
This year was different. And incredible. In many ways.
The reasons? Twofold:
- As an AWS partner now we extended our trip to include the Partner Summit
- The Customer Summit itself was off the charts
I'll discuss the latter first.
We've been attending the AWS Summit London for years and it's become an annual highlight for Martin and I to break away from the coal face of software engineering and expand our minds at the summit.
In recent years though I've been getting increasingly "meh" about the summits. Yes I always find it refreshing and inspiring to be there, there's always nuggets of useful insight and it's a really good way to refocus on the business rather than delivery. The summit trip is pretty much our AGM with opportunities for Martin and I to discuss the business: strategy, technology and plans for the year.
But last couple of years I've had some gripes… last year in 2024 was unpleasantly busy and the logistics of moving around the spaces was nigh on impossible. The keynote queue was out of control. The security gates were a terrifying bottleneck. The queues for breakout sessions and horribly slow scanning of passes meant that sessions were missed. Everything was about AI but without any actual real use-cases. Plus, with many of the sessions at an introductory technical level we were starting to feel like we had outgrown the customer summit. And the food was dreadful (it's free I know, but still…).
However. I always fill in the feedback forms, and this year it really feels like the summit team sat down with my feedback in front of them and pointed at it:
This guy… this guy speaks the truth. For 2025 we do all these things."
Every single gripe I had was smashed out of the park.
Keynote
The AWS Summit London keynote was a breath of fresh air with the main auditorium set up like a theatre in the round with a cube screen in the middle and no stage... Cue lots of murmuring about what was about to happen and where the speakers would stand.
Well... the house lights dimmed and music, dancing, lights and atmosphere kicked off an F1 season launch style intro, with the cube lifting up to reveal the stage. What followed was a superb keynote series from the various speakers.
The keynotes were shorter, more direct and some of the client testimonials were stunning - particularly Untold Studios whose portfolio was incredible and whose videos captured everyone's attention. The audience thinned out during the FinOps case studies at the end, perhaps a combination of the drier subject matter and the temptation to head out to the Expo, breakouts or Workshops.
I enjoyed the keynote this year and it was well worth being in the main auditorium for the experience.
Organisation / Logistics / Layout
Given the growth and success of the summit and the crushes last year, AWS solved this by going big on the venue. Soon there won't be anything left of the Excel in April because AWS will use it all. The summit layout was vast. Completely reorganised from last year, the first clue was that security was completed at the entrance to the Excel - once you were in, you were in. No mad queues for scanners or bag checks every time you wanted to move around.
The new layout of the Expo on the south side and the AWS areas on the north side - with the breakout theatres equally split - made for easy navigation and a different feel to each area.
The Expo area was busier and noisier, with the usual mix of ISV stands and the AWS Village attractions such as Ask an Architect. There were expanded demo spaces for chats with AWS teams on subjects like Data & AI, Modernisation and Security, plus a range of small open theatres for lightning talks. One issue here was that the small theatres were often oversubscribed and additional wireless headsets would have been used by the many standing attendees that didn't have a seat. Positioned at the entrance from the registration checkin, this side of the London Summit was really buzzing throughout the day.
The AWS areas on the north side by contrast were airier, more open and calmer, featuring plenty of areas to sit, gather and drink coffee. The sustainability hub was over here, and down in the ground floor the usual fun stuff - AWS DeepRacer, football penalties and this year a Gladiators-style travelator challenge (I was not tempted, at my great middle-age I'd just do myself an injury).
The wifi worked, the scanning of passes was quick and efficient, it was comfortable moving around.
There was no specific "lunch time" as the sessions all overlapped across 12-2pm which meant there was less of a rush for food or space to eat it. And the food was great - just simple sandwiches and pasta salad in easy to manage boxes. Perfect.
I really have to congratulate the organisers and the people who made it all work on the day.
Breakout Sessions
While AI was still a big focus in 2025, I felt there was a much better balance of AI sessions together with "traditional" cloud tech. What's more, the AI sessions - with the technology and adoption being a year older (and what a year!) - the sessions on AI were relevant, applied to real use-cases and could be directly implemented.
There were three breakout sessions that really captured my attention:
Investigate operational issues faster with AI
Delivered by Satya Konathala and Alex Livingstone from AWS this session focused on using Amazon Q Developer alongside CloudWatch and Systems Manager to triage and resolve live operational problems more quickly - with AI doing much of the heavy lifting.
The session demonstrated how Amazon Q can analyse observability data, including metrics, logs, and AWS config information, to automatically generate hypotheses for root causes. Crucially, it doesn't stop there: Q then recommends tailored remediation steps using AWS's curated runbooks, and can bring these suggestions into Slack through the Amazon Q Developer app, making it directly actionable within the team's existing workflows.
From a practical point of view, aside from actual coding this was one of the more convincing examples of AI assisting engineers. Drawing data from your actual application, environment and AWS's own operational best practices to provide insight looks powerful.
For us at Si Novi, this aligns neatly with how we deliver support and maintenance retainers for client applications. We're often tasked with investigating production issues that arise after deployment, and traditionally this means sifting through CloudWatch logs, infrastructure config, and event trails. The ability to accelerate that investigation with AI tooling and generate informed hypotheses in seconds is something we're actively exploring for clients.
AWS infrastructure as code: a year in review
This session - led by Varvara Semenova, Jonah Craig, and Brian Long - offered a strong update on the evolving landscape of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) on AWS. It covered best practices and new tooling across CloudFormation, CDK, and supporting tools like Cloud Control API, showing how they're enabling faster, safer deployments.
The section on Optimistic Stabilisation was fascinating to understand more about the underpinnings, mechanisms and critical paths within the black box of CloudFormation, and how this optimistic strategy is speeding up infrastructure deployments.
The case study was interesting, from Tines - a startup now at unicorn level with a highly automated IaC workflow. Their demo showed an AI assistant using the Cloud Control API to query the live state of AWS resources and propose updates, which were then committed as a GitHub pull request based on the existing CloudFormation templates. It was a neat example of AI + IaC in action - not magic, but genuinely useful for their team.
This talk was especially relevant for us at Si Novi. We've used CloudFormation extensively for years to provision and manage client infrastructure and in the last 12-18 months have increasingly adopted AWS CDK as our default approach for new projects. CDK gives us the expressiveness and reuse of real code, while still deploying safely through CloudFormation under the hood.
What's clear is that modern IaC isn't just about YAML or JSON anymore, it's about integrating your infrastructure lifecycle with version control, review workflows, and now even intelligent tooling. And that aligns perfectly with how we manage client infrastructure today: Git-driven, automated, and consistent.
We'll be exploring more around Q Developer and the Cloud Control API and how they might support smarter diagnostics and remediation in future projects.
Generative AI meets multi-tenancy: inside a working solution
A surprise highlight of the day came right at the end - "Generative AI meets multi-tenancy" - presented by Dr Anil Giri, Mehran Najafi, and Victor Popsecu from SteelEye. This session tackled some of the thornier issues we're actively exploring for a forthcoming project: context-aware, permission-sensitive RAG architectures in a multi-tenant SaaS environment.
SteelEye, a compliance and analytics platform, shared their practical experience of implementing Gen-AI in a regulated multi-tenant context using Amazon Bedrock, vector databases, and knowledge bases. The session stood out not just for the architecture diagrams, but for its real-world grounding: onboarding flows, tenant isolation strategies, and tiered service levels based on customer entitlements.
Crucially, it explored:
- Data partitioning and isolation, both at storage and inference level
- Multi-tenant RAG patterns, with context retrieved per tenant and tied to access controls
- Use of Bedrock and embedding services, abstracting away some of the ops complexity while remaining customisable
- How knowledge bases can be scoped per tenant, enforcing data segregation and traceability
- Patterns for introducing service tiers (e.g. token limits, custom model access, response filtering) across different customer levels
We'd already had a helpful chat earlier in the day with an AWS Solutions Architect about tenant-aware retrieval strategies, so seeing the concepts reinforced and extended in a proper production case study helped crystallise our thinking.
For Si Novi, this was hugely relevant. We've built multi-tenant B2B platforms for years - often with complex RBAC and data isolation - and we're now applying that same thinking to generative AI integrations. This talk gave us new language, new patterns, a lot of photos of the slides and a few solid "we're not mad" moments. A great end to the day.
Entertainment and networking
We don't attend the summit for networking but it is a nice bonus. This year it was good to catch up with clients and colleagues at various points during the day, and then as the summit came to a close we grabbed a beer and watched the brass brand sign off with a medley of pop hits. It felt like there were probably fun things happening all across the Expo and AWS halls as people started to let their hair down, I bet different experiences were had all over depending on where you found yourself at the end of the day.
Our day was rounded off at the AWS Comsum (AWS Community Summit) networking event held at the nearby Tapas bar after the summit. As big fans of the Comsum this is a regular post-summit event for us. After great chats with peers and AWS partner friends we called it a day. A really good day.
AWS London Partner Summit
The second aspect that made 2025 so special is our status as an AWS Partner and attending the AWS Partner Summit for the first time.
Held at the Royal Lancaster hotel next to Hyde Park, it was a suitably swanky venue for a small and very personal event where parters such as ourselves are able to network with each other and hear from the AWS Partner team.
It was a hugely valuable day, and validated the route we've taken to embrace the Partner Network. It confirmed to us that the value in the network is opening the door to better tools, insights, and support that help us deliver more effectively for our clients.
In hindsight we should have joined the Partner Network years ago, however we can be proud of what we've achieved thus far, and now we can look forward to accelerating our growth and impact for our clients with the support of AWS.
From co-selling and funding programmes to direct access to AWS solution architects, it's already changing the way we approach engagement, project planning and technical discovery.
The Partner Summit gave us a glimpse into that growing ecosystem - one that's collaborative, surprisingly open, and clearly designed to help partners like us scale what we do best: building well-architected, cloud-native solutions that solve real-world problems.
Conclusions
This year felt fresh, new and exciting. The summit was re-energised and I now look forward to going again and see what new things are in place next year. And the Partner Summit is a way to anchor our new AWS Partner engagment and grow.
For our clients, that means more insight, better access, and solutions shaped by the very best of what AWS has to offer.
No longer am I meh about the AWS Summit, I'm simply excited for the next one.
