AWS Summit Toronto 2026

Table of Contents

Introduction

Well that’s a wrap! AWS Summit Toronto 2026 happened on June 3, 2026 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, and was a great experience. AWS Summit is a free one-day event that includes keynotes, expert-led sessions, labs and training, developer and community events. In addition, the Expo area has booths for many AWS groups and partners to learn more about AWS products and services, new technology, and lots of opportunity for networking. There are typically also “Happy Hour” events sponsored by vendors after the official sessions, which are a great place to continue the conversation and have some good food and drink with others in the community.

Last year I was excited to attend, as I had been selected to deliver a Dev Chat at the AWS Community Lounge, but I ended up having to cancel my session and attendance, as I had an accident at the end of July, and needed surgery on my knee, which limited my mobility. Thankfully I am mostly healed now after a lot of physiotherapy, and I was happy to attend this year, and help out at the AWS Builder Center booth.

I was lucky that despite the injury taking a lot of my time away from articles and in-person community participation, I was able to renew with the AWS Community Builders program for my 5th year. I will be working hard to increase my articles and presentations this year with less distraction.

Morning

I got to the venue around 9AM, went through a security bag check and picked up my event badge. Registration was pretty fast – the line-up was moving along quickly, and there were lots of people helping out to guide you through. If you live in Toronto or are arriving the day before the Summit, you can typically find time to pick up your badge the day before, to avoid the lines.

I managed to grab some coffee to fill up my travel mug, and did a quick wander through the Expo area before heading over to the booth I would be helping at for the day. There were already presentations going on, but I got set up to help out for a couple of hours while the main keynote was going on.

The traffic at the AWS Builder Center booth was steady. We mainly got questions about the different AWS Community Group chapters, and when they met. All of the AWS User Groups can be found through this page, which is a central directory of recognized user groups. There is also a directory of Student Builder Groups (previously called AWS Cloud Clubs) for student led groups. Many of the events are organized through Meetup.com, and the location and RSVP link can be found through the site.

Midday

The AWS Keynote typically goes from 11AM-12PM, followed by lunch. I typically find people start leaving during the last presentation to beat the lines for lunch, so I feel bad for whoever is presenting last.

Fortunately, it looks like there was plenty of lunches – healthy bowls with grains, vegetables and protein (chicken or tofu), plus cold drinks. In previous years there was a shortage and food ran out pretty quickly, but this year it looks like there was plenty of extras. I grabbed a bowl and tucked it away while I finished up at the booth, then grabbed a seat in the lunch area to quickly eat so I could check out some sessions.

Sessions

Many of the sessions had pretty long lines to get into, so you had to line up at least half an hour beforehand to have a chance of getting in. Hopefully many of the sessions will have the recordings and presentations made available, as it was very difficult to get into some of them.

The Anthropic session was very crowded and was difficult to hear anything, so I didn’t stick around.

I mainly attended Dev Chat sessions by the community at the AWS Builder Center. I caught a bit of a presentation from one of our AWS Heroes – Darryl Ruggles on an AI based recipe building program which looked pretty good.

The presentation from Ajay Dhungel on running OpenClaw on AWS Lightsail was very popular. I couldn’t get a set of earphones to hear properly, but I listened for a bit. Hopefully the presentation will be published for reference.

My favorite presentation was from Edwin Moedano on a topic near and dear to my heart – securing infrastructure delivery in AWS. This was a polished presentation that broke down many components within the deployment stack to catch formatting, security misconfiguration and vulnerabilities, and check policies before automated deployment occurs between pre-production and production environments. Lots of great tips like using OIDC instead of static credentials to authenticate GitHub Actions to run Terraform, using Checkov and OPA to automatically scan the repository and check for policy issues or security vulnerabilities, and how to structure the repositories using Terraform modules to manage multiple environments.

I have a lot of screenshots of this presentation in the gallery below, so check it out, and follow Edwin through his socials – hopefully he’ll post the presentation and recordings. Here is the GitHub Repo with sample code.

Expo Area

There were a lot of vendors in the Expo area, some with some contests or prizes going on, some giving away swag, but all up for a conversation and to answer questions. There was a “swag passport” that you could pick up to find a few of the vendor booths to get a stamp, and you could take it to a booth in the corner to redeem once full. If they do this again, I recommend checking first to see if it’s worth your time to do – in this case, you may have run around to 6 booths and wait in line for a stamp, to get a basic notebook or bag.

The AWS Agents area had a fun 8-Bit arcade “game” that let you pick your avatar and test out some of the potential of building applications with Kiro – the AWS AI Coding IDE. The art style was charming, and the system let you choose your quest, your persona, a sidekick (in my case, a chicken), and an inventory. It had a Pokemon style interface, but was run mostly through prompts.

I always recommend visiting the “AWS Ask The Experts” booths, and checking out a new product or service, and asking some questions. In some cases, they will give you a code for some AWS credits so you can test out some things. I dragged a friend to the AWS DevOps Agent booth to see how the service worked, how you could trigger it to do some initial troubleshooting and provide remediation suggestions, and how to integrate it into your observability and paging systems.

Networking and Happy Hour

After the sessions, there was a networking event in the Expo area with drinks and some nibbles. I wandered to a few booths and chatted with some people, but a lot of them were already packing up, and the place emptied pretty quickly.

We had a mixer for all of the volunteers at the AWS Builders Center at Kelly’s Landing, so I went to that for a bit to chat with the other AWS Heroes and Community Builders. We met at the booth to do a group photo, and met back up at the restaurant around 6:45PM.

They had some pretty tasty appetizers, including some spicy gyoza. I unfortunately had to rush off to another event before the full dinner arrived, but it was great celebrating the hard work with everyone.

One of the after parties was at Paris Texas – a saloon type bar, where everyone seemed to end up. Had some good chats with some of the AWS crew and some of the vendors here – and it was going pretty strong by the time I had to leave to go catch my train home.

Conclusion

AWS Summit Toronto continues to be a great experience. The opportunities for learning about new technology, the networking opportunities with vendors and partners, and especially with the community makes it a great time.

Special thanks to Aliza Newman for all the coordination and support and making the AWS Builders Center desk and presentations run as smoothly as it did. Also, was great to chat with Darryl Ruggles, Angelo Mandato, and all the other AWS Community Builders and Heroes that attended and presented.

Hope to return again next year! If you’re interested – I recommend signing up for email alerts and registering as early as you can, as registration closed very quickly. I know a few people who missed being able to attend due to this.