Forem: VijayaNirmalaGopal

AWS Community Builder 2026 - Applications Open !!

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 05:32:12 +0000

Welcome to a pleasant & successful 2026 !! What's not to talk or write about AWS Community Builders program Applications being open for 2026? All along, I have written articles about AWS, Services, Benefits, Experiences but this time, rather writing lines & lines I created the below image :-) Fun, Interesting way to look at everything for a AWS Community Builder at one poster !! Hope you guys like it !!

All things Kiro & Road to reinvent Hackathon Experience 2025

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 04:29:16 +0000

Welcome all to the blog of AWS Kiro Introduction & re:invent 2025 Hackathon Experience !!

This year, I had got the greatest opportunity of participating in the AWS Hackathon - Road to re:invent 2025, which is one of its kind, AWS Kiro hackathon, organized by Team AWS, Originated from Los Angeles to Las Vegas via a Bus, where 10 different teams participate to hack the challenge set by AWS, competing for $100,000 prize money :-)

Yay, first of all, the experience was thrilling, challenging but need to agree, it was tiring too !! Well, the fun part began, when Team AWS set us the challenge to develop most useless application for a non-existent problem, by including all possible AWS Services to develop & show case using AWS Kiro. Unbelievable yet true !! Who would expect such a challenge from Team AWS? But they did threw this on 10 teams, I was part of Team Pink with 4 other experts in AWS

All 10 teams, 5 Buses, 2 Teams in a Bus, boarded, started shortly after Promo event from Los Angeles. Buses were fully equipped with WiFi, Chairs, Tables to support laptops, snacks, hosting teams, one competing team at the front and other team at the end of the bus, cameras crew in between these two teams, focussing people & happenings

We did break for lunch at "Calico House" for burgers & sandwiches pre-ordered, followed to that, boarded the bus & reached Las Vegas around evening, to the tent set up just close to The Linq, Las Vegas. We were all welcomed with Trumpets, music, cheering up by Team AWS, hosts who supported and other key players who backed up the operations & events for this Hackathon. What a joy !

In the tent, both visionaries in AWS, Swami Sivasubramanian, Jeff Barr came out to the stage, set it on fire, by their introduction about the hackathon event, agenda, each team with a 60 seconds pitch showcased their idea, app developed as per the challenge set. After a few minutes of discussion, Judges announced the winners of Hackathon and launched the re:invent 2025 officially.

Team pink(my team) didn't win but yet, I had the best of the experience & learnings in participating. I still believe that, we should have won, given our use case. I stand to congratulate all the teams that took part, Team AWS, Co-ordinators, Think Tanks behind this, Production Units, Camera crew and everyone !!

Coming to our use case for the hackathon, we developed a front end to simulate the "Seattle Gum Wall" for people to create gum wall at their home or county, ordering gums of flavour, color, origin, pack it to their favourite celebrity to chew & contribute to the gum wall, community borne gum wall displays, thoughts, ideas provisioning, listings. We used AWS Kiro, fed in the use case,AWS Kiro created specification driven tasks to be carried out in order to implement this solution

Technically we used all possible services in AWS starting with Kiro, Amplify, DynamoDB, automated deployment, Cognito, MCP Servers, and many more overly complicating for an non-existent problem :-)

Learnings were invaluable & they were about:

1) Team work - Like other teams, we were different people & personalities of varied talents & capabilities but joined hands to gather for a common purpose. we had our own ice breaking time(not much really) but understood each other preference on the go

2) Commitment - Every one picked up their tasks, provided prompts in spec based development, created & worked on our tasks as divided and stood up to the completion; Close to the end, I wasn't well, and had to swap tasks with the team and I stand proud to know, how well we collaborated

3) Share & Learn - We weren't aware of all the services that were identified to be used, yet, we helped each other giving overview and relied on each others' support, as & when needed

4) Adopt - There were lot of technical glitches(especially for me, from my laptop on committing to GitHub, buffer size, browser compatibility) and all of us adopted to the changes as required. Yet, we overcame and reached the goal at the end, being adaptive to the situation thrown at us !! Yay !!

5) Be united - One among each of the 5 member team, will be elected as Leader, our Team Lead as well, presented our Idea & App to the Judges and though we didn't win, we are happy & content about the use case, our effort and glad that we made it as a team and had a blast

With this experience, I encourage each of the fellow aspirants, to try AWS Kiro and learn about the sensational "Spec driven development" and who knows, this could be the next level or new way of IT development & rollout. The usage & benefits gained could vary based on every requirement, budget, perspectives but it is worth knowing it all !!

Few links to start with:

Official Documentation: https://aws.amazon.com/documentation-overview/kiro/
Start with AWS Kiro: https://kiro.dev
Installation: https://kiro.dev/docs/getting-started/installation/
Spec driven development: https://kiro.dev/docs/specs/
Pricing Page: https://kiro.dev/pricing/
Blogs on Kiro: https://kiro.dev/blog/

Amazon Q Developer & Q CLI Essentials Coverage

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:17:04 +0000

Welcome to the first post of series of essential posts about using Amazon Q CLI !! I have tried to accommodate all the questions raised during the Toronto Summit Devchat talks here and will add up with more in upcoming blog posts

Let's talk Amazon Q. It is generative AI assistant which is conversational chatbot responding to user queries in a prompt-response model. Amazon Q Developer & Amazon Q CLI are backed by Amazon Q for their functioning and the natural language support as a Chatbot service, is provided by Amazon Bedrock LLMs

Take a look at this coverage to understand Q Developer & Q CLI in brief:

For understanding on security aspect of using Amazon Q Developer or Q CLI:

To use different LLM for Q CLI:

Based on requirement, if you have to use a different LLM model, then change the selection for Amazon Q CLI connection as below. By default, it picks up below

We can change the preferred LLM most suitable for your use case at command line(refer below)

or better yet, you can select while connecting to Q CLI, pass the LLM selection as parameter

Hope this helps in understanding the key pointers to know, before using Q Developer in IDE or CLI. We will find more about Q CLI Cloud & Non-Cloud Capabilities in the upcoming series !! Look Out !!

AWS Toronto Summit 2025 - My Experience at DEV202 session

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 16:54:00 +0000

What a day at AWS Summit Toronto 2025 ? It was a Rainy start but it was worth the Event. Mornings started with people rushing up to the Metro Convention centre, Badge pickup queues, catching up with their gang, reaching out for help, finding out their sessions of interest, wandering through the stalls at the expo & many more

Likewise, for me, I entered into Developer Community Lounge and reported at the desk for my upcoming session!! Team AWS was ready with the host, stage and all was set.

Now the moment has come, I started with the session, it was full house and I should say, I was amazed to look at people interested in knowing about Amazon Q CLI. As session progressed, fellow aspirants' interest & effort in understanding became more and more visible. I could sense the 'Awww' feel when I started with AI-DLC process, terms and its evolution and the room was surprised & acknowledged Amazon Q CLI on witnessing the hand drawn architecture diagrams transformed to code in no time with proper suggestions & recommendations in terms of best practices, configuration, cost estimation & optimization strategies, as well.

Ended with good note on explaining about non-cloud efficiencies of Amazon Q CLI, I was thrilled to receive the different perspectives, flow of thoughts, ideas of usage, opinions about using Q CLI for various requirements.

Had a great time catching up with fellow community builders, other cloud enthusiasts, leaders, makers, real users, veterans of AWS Cloud, enjoyed the Key note and other sessions too.

Thanks & Kudos to team AWS to have hosted a great event in spite of weather(Yes, it was a rainy day) !!

I did receive couple of questions about security & integration aspects for using Amazon Q CLI. Hence, I have planned to release those answers as blogs along with the use cases that were part of the session

Looking forward to take part in the upcoming summits, as well !!

AWS Savings Plans doesn't assure cost savings; Tracking & Amending with AWS Budgets does !!

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:18:16 +0000

This article is to bring out the essential reason & benefits of having Budget setup for being on track with the usage of Savings Plans based on coverage/utilization factors

Welcome to an ultimate pocket guide on AWS Savings Plans' understanding & tracking the same using AWS Budget !!

We all know that AWS Budgets exists to notify us on the status of exceeding the threshold towards a resource configuration. This helps in having resource utilization under control and eliminates AWS Invoice surprises(not good ones though :-()

In this article, let us take a setup of budget for tracking "Daily Savings Plan Coverage/Utilization" . Without an iota of doubt, this is extremely important to pursue the full benefits of AWS Savings Plans.

Let us see, the budget setup in few screenshots
Step 1:

Step 2: Illustrated to create Savings Plan Coverage budget tracking at resource EC2 level

Step 3: Illustrated to create Savings Plan Utilization budget tracking

Step 4: Chosen to receive alerts via email; But officially, designate SNS Topic or Chat bot alerts which is the right way of setting up alerts. Emails if used, can be group or team email id, so that a group stays notified rather than individuals

Step 5: Simple illustration of creating a Savings Plan coverage budget

Now that we know how to setup budget to track the coverage of Compute instance against the Savings Plan procured, let us as well see the benefits of having them in place

Why Savings Plan is being Purchased ?
Savings Plan offers discounts over on-demand rate on your Compute Resources like EC2, Sagemaker thus enabling you to save unto 72% on costs. With data driven SP purchase recommendations & your homework, you can opt in for buying Savings Plan(s). Key driving factor for purchasing a Savings Plan is when you have committed usage of any compute resource for 1 to 3 year period

What is Coverage on Savings Plan ?
Coverage represents how much of your usage of compute is utilizing the discounted price of SP or how much of compute usage is running on on-demand rates

What is Utilization on Savings Plan ?
Savings Plan is purchased by committing to use certain amount per house and Utilization gives actual usage out of the committed amount

Purpose of threshold against Coverage & Utilization ?
Threshold is defined at scale of 1-100 and Budget tracker notifies you when utilization or coverage goes below the threshold defined

Ideal Threshold ?
Though threshold is same and needs to be defined at 100% to make the most out of the SP(s)

What does the SP Coverage threshold breach represent ?
Coverage threshold set at 90% & if it goes below that then you have committed less for per hourly in Savings Plan(s) and will end up paying the remaining compute usage with on-demand rates

Low on SP Coverage Illustration:
SP Commitment Rate per hour = $100
Actual Usage per hour cost = $110
$10 usage is billed at on-demand rate which means you are under committed/hour in your SP(s)

Low on SP Coverage & What to do ?
Represents potential miss on savings with under-committed SP Purchase and denotes buying SP with higher commitment rate or additional SP(s) with revised commitment rates based on recommendations

What does the SP Utilization threshold breach represent ?
Utilization threshold for example 90%, and if reported below 90% by AWS Budget tracker, then this is clear case of over commitment of usage/hourly on SP(s)

Low on SP Utilization Illustration:
SP Commitment Rate per hour = $100
Actual Usage per hour = $90
Utilization is 90% an hour, $10 is wasted which means you are over committed/hour in your SP(s)

Low on SP Utilization & What to do ?
Represents cloud waste and SP(s) commitment rate needs to be revised/reduced based on recommendations or SP(s) needs to be returned

Key Restrictions on returning SP(s) to AWS:

AWS SP purchased should be active
AWS SP can be returned within 7 days
AWS SP returns quota not exceeded
Hourly commitment made towards SP should be at least $100

Happy Optimizing !!

How to save 70% of AWS Compute Costs for non production workloads?

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 04:55:32 +0000

Welcome to fellow AWS Cloud aspirants for a basic AWS Cost optimization post with brief points & an architecture diagram for the same.

Intention is to highlight scope & potential of applying cost optimization in non production workloads as well. This example, is considering a web application tier in Public Subnet, business logic tier & RDS backed database in individual private subnets

Above is a basic representation of a simple web application with business & database tier implementation. Below is the order to save costs

Resources EC2, RDS should be created with Key,Value tags for this design to work. To enforce this, the user or source which creates these resources should be attached with IAM policy aws:RequestTag condition(s)
Assume that these resources are now created with resource tag(Key:Value)
Create a Amazon Event bridge rule with cron scheduler time defined as according to your nature of business purpose
Prepare a python boto or any other script to start & stop these instances & RDS instances according to cron scheduler and key value tags defined with the respective resources
Watch the cost being saved from the moment this setup is up & running

While the steps & logic looks simpler, this is extremely basic aspect of implementing cost savings. Wondering how? Well, Non production workloads are not expected to run always and hence those can be always stopped and started on weekdays when team or developers actually need

For example, let us say, I am running 1 c5a large instance, as per above architecture
Ec2 Run Time: 24*30(let us assume 30 days a month running for 24 hours) = 720 hours of EC2/RDS uptime
Team/Developer work time: 4 weeks(a Month timeline) * 40(5 days, 8 hours a week) = 160 Hours
Idle time = 720–160 = 560 Hours

What if I told, that you can save up on 560 idle hours? let see with real estimate now

AWS online pricing calculator, takes 730 hours for a month and estimates 112.42/month cost for c5a.xlarge instance usage. So if we stop & stop for 730–160 hours, 570 hours of savings is almost 78% will be $87.7 in savings per month and stand to pay $24.72. Isnt this huge? After all, money saved is money earned

To add up, please see the estimate of Amazon RDS(MySQL) cost for a month, without opting for Proxy usage, Single Zone, Opted out RDS Insights

Idea is to emphasize the importance of potential of implementing this cost saving during the design phase of architecting cloud solutions. In a improvised design, we can opt for reserved/savings plan instances and we will see about those enhancements & various other scenarios, in the upcoming posts

Happy learning !!

Why AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner??

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Sat, 31 May 2025 23:16:55 +0000

Hi Folks,

Managed to obtain AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam !! Well, for many, it might look strange to take up cloud practitioner for AWS hands-on person but I had my own realizations on taking up "Cloud Practitioner" exam

In general, people who are just entering cloud or getting know about AWS Cloud from a business or functional perspective, take up "Cloud Practitioner" to get them thorough about the key & vital concepts

In spite of solid experience in AWS, I decided for the following reasons

`1. Any individual might get to use key services as per their domain like infrastructure, big data, management & governance or FinOps and So am I. But practitioner, gave absolute coverage on other essential areas like Support, Business Perspectives, Services of great use but haven't heard or used, sources to reach out etc

Nothing less for foundational as the name explains it all`

As usual, I took up courses & practice exams from Udemy, blue prints and additional courses in AWS Skill Builder, as well.

Once again, happy learning !!

The usual - Journey of my AWS Certified AI Practitioner !!

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Sun, 25 May 2025 04:24:01 +0000

Hi Folks,

Yes, I braved to appear & obtained "AWS AI Certified Practitioner" certificate !!

My sources were AI Practitioner course & practice exams from Udemy. Alongside, I also learnt from AWS Skill builder courses, as well. Thanks to the AWS Community Program for voucher & motivation, as well.

For many years, I didn't prefer certification for concerns around few reasons 1) Why do I need it ? 2) What if I fail 3) Is it mandatory in IT for my role

Finally, I made up my mind to give it a try irrespective of the results because of 2 reasons.

1) Irrespective of expertise/exposure held, gaining a certification stands as a proof of your knowledge 2) Moreover, to master category under AWS or any area, it is the only right way so not to end up in a Rabbit hole

Hence it is AWS Certification Vs our assumptions :-) Chose wisely :-)

Lessons learnt from hosting a virtual meetup for AWS UG Women in Tech India

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Sat, 17 May 2025 03:42:18 +0000

Welcome to another interesting post !!

To being with, I would like to share with fellow builders that I have been renewed for 6th time as an AWS community builder. Thanks to the community where I have learnt & learning a lot from community, utilizing the resources too. Absolutely grateful and as a give back, I do create content that makes more sense & useful to the community.

Main agenda for this post, is to share my experience of hosting a virtual meetup for AWS UG Women in Tech India group. Since the idea of bringing in Global talents to the group, I had lot of hurdles to get over which includes difficulties in sticking to a date & time, availability of speaker, hosting platform(s), poster creation, co-ordination, execution, technical glitches, setting the stage etc. Instead of narrating what/how/ things happened and how those situations were remediated, I felt that listing my learnings will be good help, to fellow AWS Builder or AWS UG Co-ordinator

Lessons learnt from hosting a virtual session for AWS UG:

Once decided, go ahead and host a session, whatsoever may come
Prepare a template or notes kind of information to share with Speaker right when you invite a person to be a speaker. Give in all the details that a speaker would want to know
Essential pointers are
AWS User Group
Registration source
Members anticipated to join vMembers currently in the group
Platform to host
Permissions needed to access those platforms(like Streamyard, Youtube)
Topic Categories or choices for a speaker
Duration of session
Demo included or not
Q & A required at the end of the session
Key Takeaways
Summarizing Session related details in Poster(with Canvas or any)
Co-ordination team(if hosted my more than one member
Social media write ups to publish in X, LinkedIn, Instagram
Take help from the community rather User Group for which the meetup is hosted
On D-Day, Join 15 minutes earlier, to sort out Audio/Video checks, screen share & others, if any
Now start hosting, as per the software used for hosting
Promote the session in social media much earlier with date & time with relevant hashtags
Embrace technical glitches during the session !! Yes, it is all part & parcel of any event
Post the session, publish a new post with Speaker handles, Session video sources(YouTube or any other podcast links), Github Links, Blogs or any resource that could of use to people and make it available to all, for reference
Live is challenging & hard at times !! Don't give up. Let's do it !!

I personally thank AWS WiT India Group lead co-ordinators who extended their time, support & knowledge and special shout out to my speaker(Yes, it is @rola Dali) who has stood with the commitment in spite of her busy schedule. Thankyou !!

Hope this helps & inspires people to host interesting AWS UG Sessions !!

How to gain maximum out of AWS Compute Architectures?

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 17:06:35 +0000

Welcome to another essentials post with AWS Compute Architecture !! AWS Compute is about using provisioning EC2 servers for implementing functional aspects of any business requirement.

This post is about "How to get the maximum out of EC2 services but yet save huge on costs(given the workload can accommodate Spot interruptions) ?"

Need #1: Application hosted on AWS now meets with the business requirement but off late has gathered momentum and gets sudden demand with peaked requests. Existing design has to accommodate varying workload scenarios and should be capable of scaling up & down automatically

Autoscaling & Application Load Balancer together helps in making the compute capacity available for peak loads and ALB assures that traffic or requests are routed to healthy instances available inside an auto scaling group

Need #2: EC2 instance attribute types like OS/AMI or memory, storage, network parameters have to be rightly defined & used consistently

Launch Templates has to be used in order to retain multiple versions of Instance attributes combination(by using versions) and can be used for provisioning as needed along with Auto Scaling Group

Need #3: Capacity scales as needed during peak/off peak timelines with on-demand instances but we need best optimum compute usage to save costs

Creating EC2 Spot Fleet requests & spot instances(for workloads supporting interruptions & resuming) will make the implementation super successful & efficient by giving upto 90% discounts on compute usage

Need #4: Incoming traffic should be routed to all healthy instances that are available at any point in time

Definition & using of Target Groups will ensure the health check of the instance & redirects the requests from ALB as accordingly. Also helps in grouping mix of instance types like on-demand & spot definitions for a highly available & fault tolerant Application

For a focused explanation on spot & benefits rather an architectural blend, then visit Link

For AWS Compute architecture using all on-demand compute capacity please refer to Link

How to nail AWS Architecting? ...with baby steps !!

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:01:52 +0000

Welcome to another new thought !! I was thinking about how I was struggling to understand AWS Architecture diagrams that were picture perfect, well written by scholars/Top notch Architects yet I stared at those architectures and moved on as I was overwhelmed with lot of components laid out and couldn't grasp it from the pictorial !! It could have been because of lack of confidence and/or knowledge gap.

But with relentless effort, I started by hand drafting many incorrect versions and finally perfected it with time. If I can get it right, anyone else can and hence this post it to encourage folks to do architecture diagrams!!

To narrate the learning curve, I am presenting a simple requirement-component mapping made into an architecture evolution, from simple sentences to AWS Services mapping. Nevertheless, this will lead to a sensible completion and will surprise you!! Let us start !!

Need #1: Business is currently on-premise and would like to make its presence on Cloud

AWS Cloud

Need #2: Identify the region; Region is decided based on the business requirement on where the clients/users are rather the organizations' operational area

AWS Region selection

Need #3 & #4: Web Application server & backend Database Server are to be hosted on AWS

AWS Compute(EC2), DB on AWS RDS

Need #5: Web Application needs to communicate with DB Server; There has to be mechanism to operate in cloud, a segregation, privacy, just like how it was in an on-premise data centre. For logical segregation & security, a VPC has to be created. To operate in a region, we need to select a availability zone, which is were the data centre with servers are made available for us

AWS VPC, Availability Zone

Need #6: Web Application Server has to access Internet

AWS VPC Public Subnet, Internet Gateway brings internet access to App server

Need #7: DB Server has to be safeguarded as transactional data are stored here

AWS Private Subnet with no internet access

Need #8: App server should be accessible to End Users

AWS Route 53 to access the domain/host name via Internet Gateway onto the App server in Public Subnet

Need #9: DB server should be accessible to App Server

AWS Security Groups Rules, NAT Gateway to establish connection

Need #10: Design must cover servers or region failures

Multi-AZ

Need #11: Application must ensure High Availability & Elasticity & meet the peak demands of the customers

AWS Autoscaling & Load Balancing

P.S. There are areas of improvement here like including Observability & monitoring, Optimization of compute services etc but to start with, I believe, that the scope represented here, will make more sense.

I believe this will create spark or motivate people to create or reading AWS architectures, going forward

Good Luck Folks !!

How not to lose money on AWS RI standard

VijayaNirmalaGopal — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 05:24:25 +0000

AWS Reserved Instances is a compute capacity reserving method for a committed term of 1 or 3 years, which provides upto 75% discount when compared to the usage of on-demand instances. The cost savings aspect, out of the long term commitment, is the most prominent reason why people/teams purchase RI

But when reality strikes, organizations end up having un-utilized reserved instances, thus losing money on the investment made on RI(s)

So the best deal on the table, to gain from the under or not utilized RI Purchase (Standard) is to Resell the unused RI(s) in AWS Marketplace. Below is the high level process representation of selling the RI(Standard) capacity on AWS marketplace

Pre-requisites for resale:

RI is standard type of purchase
RI is for EC2 and not for RDS or Elasticache
RI(EC2) not purchased under volume discounts
AWS accounts not par of India accounts
AWS accounts/owner has US bank & Tax details for to sell in marketplace

Possible reasons for RI under utilization:

Business is moving to different region than the originally planned
Project or requirement is completed well ahead of schedule
Capacity utilization was not as anticipated

Benefits of selling in AWS Marketplace:

Inspire of various limitations on selling the capacity back onto AWS Marketplace, AWS provides an option to resell the capacity on hand
Money is not lost entirely by unused instances and saves on cost
RI(standard) can be released in the marketplace, after registering as 'Seller', providing Bank & Tax details and list the instances with your price
Listed RI(s) price can be modified as needed
On sale of RI(s), owner of the RI will be emailed about the details and AWS Automated clearing house wire transfer will be made to the AWS account owner of RI(s) bank details(shared earlier while registering for the AWS marketplace)

AWS Marketplace is digital catalog where curated third party softwares/solutions can be purchased or sold for other companies/clients to use it for subscription based charges for the service provided

How to identify RI usage effectiveness?
Use AWS "RI Utilization Report" to find out the actual utilization of the RI instances purchased. By this way, we can find out under utilized or not utilized instances and call for action

How to identify RI actual usage ?
Use AWS "RI Coverage Report" to find out how much of the accounts' EC2 usage is being covered from RI purchase

With the above way, customers can save on costs spent on purchase of RI(s) and can follow the AWS Compute Optimizer and/or AWS Cost Explorer recommendations for future purchase of RI

Happy cost savings !!