AWS Community GameDay Europe 2026 Recap

Did you ever have had the chance to attend an AWS GameDay before? It’s a fun event where you can learn new things, explore AWS services you’ve never touched before and network with other cloud enthusiasts. I always try to take part in at least one during AWS re:Invent .

I organized the local branch of the AWS Community GameDay Europe 2026 event for our AWS User Group in Nürnberg. And, it was a blast. But before we hope right into the recap, let’s start first by checking out…

What is an AWS GameDay?

An AWS GameDay is an event where you work your way through different quest together with a team of around four people. The quests often contain fixing infrastructure setups getting your hands on various AWS services. The faster you are the more points you’ll get. It often happens, that you are loosing points if not fixing things. So you want your team to be fast.

GameDays vary in topic, the amount of quests and their focus. They are often used to break the ice for a new topic or AWS Service the GameDay organizers want to let the teams emerge in. The size of the teams depend on the organizer’s focus. Often teams of four, but this can vary due to the event.

These events are not only for seasoned AWS experts, but a fantastic way to finally get your hands dirty on all things AWS if your are new to the field.

GameDays are organized for companies, organizations or at AWS events. But they are not that common at pure community events. Especially, not common in that scale: Europe-wide.

A GameDay for the European Community

The GameDay for the European AWS community was happening at a whole other level: 53 User Groups all over Europe took part in this event. And now imagine: this doesn’t mean we have only 53 teams. Every User Group had various teams depending on their local scale. At Nuremberg we had 4 teams with 4 people each. Other bigger cities even had 15 teams. Doing the maths, we probably reached over 2000+ participants. The European community nailed it. 💪🏻🦄 Even at GameDays I attend at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, there were probably only 200-300 attendees.

But, how did it start?

The European Community GameDay wouldn’t be possible without those two brilliant minds who took their local activities to the next level: Anda-Catalina Giraud, AWS User Group Lead Geneva and Jérôme Vanhoutte, AWS User Group Lead Belgium. Anda already brought her experience from the AWS Community GameDay Francophone 2025 which she organized together with other leaders from the French speaking AWS community in Europe and Africa. With 19 User Groups participating, it was a huge success. So, Jérôme and Anda wanted to bring it to all the European User Groups. What a scale!

How did it continue?

Since I wasn’t part of the global organization team, I can’t give you the raw behind-the-scenes. One can imagine that such an event at this scale is not just fun to organize. But what I can say is, that it was such a fun event to participate and bringing the GameDay spirit to our local AWS community. The preparation for the local User Group Leads already started in December. You could also join the global organization team as a supporter working on various topics. There was a lot to prepare. The organization team made the best effort to provide an exceptional experience, i.e. by trying to customize the GameDay topics as much as possible. Usually, AWS GameDays have a fixed range of topics your can choose from: The GameDay catalogue. But this time, Anda and Jérôme created a whole new GameDay experience with focus topics we as User Group Leaders could influence. Thanks to all the folks at AWS who made this possible. 🙌🏻

Which topics we tackle?

The GameDay had four main topics: Security, Kubernetes (EKS), Serverless and AI Agents. All the topics gathered around the typical GameDay story “Fixing the Unicorn Rental Shop”. So, participants not only have random quests to finish, they also had a fun and relatable story to emerge in. (Psst! It’s often the story and this one boss who is taking the numbers too serious. So the dev team needs to hurry 😅)

As part of the preparation, it was necessary for us User Group Leads to test the GameDay before. That meant Dry-Run time! By playing it yourself, you can help the participants way better if they are stuck. Even I was sometimes stuck while playing it (i.e. didn’t read the task thoroughly, didn’t know the respective service before or event never touched real deep-dive security issues). And at the end, I learned lots of new tings! This is why I love such event formats like a GameDay.

How we made it happen on-site

First of all, the whole local experience wouldn’t tbe possible without our local sponsor and partner for the event: adesso SE Nürnberg! 🙌🏻 Our local support and User Group friend, Eduard Zaft, helped making the experience on-site as smooth as it can be. So, a big shout-out to our local community supporters! A huge “Thank you” goes to my local supporters, Joachim Aumann and Alexander Eiswirth, as well. With out those two we had the most awesome GameDay supporters!

It’s all about the preparation

At our location on-site, we prepared tables for the participating teams as well as having enough electricity sockets available. A lot of laptops needed power 😄 The global organization team made a wonderful job providing a preparation guide both for the local organizers and location preparation. The preparation guide contained details, i.e. about how many sockets per m² should be installed or checklist for the setup at the location. The guide helped to share the details with our location sponsor. It made the plan work out like a charm.

But it was not only about preparation guides and GameDay test-run-through, the organizers and the AWS employees supporting this event prepared prices, too!

You can’t go home without prices!

There were two price categories: Global prices for the over-all Europe-wide winners, and prices for the local winning teams. Locally speaking, we had lovely medals, AWS Credits and Stickers.

Final thoughts

First of all and besides all the hustle and issues we had during the GameDay with the platform, I want to show my true appreciation for the global organization team providing an exceptional base for this day. From planning the quests, to organizing Q&As, to providing guidance and making it an European experience, it felt awesome to bring this event to our local AWS User Group.

I think we’ve all learned a lot during that day. For me it was especially, how to handle such interactive events having participants with different level of expertise. Especially because we had a smaller amount of teams (only four in total) and participants with all levels of expertise, general issues with the quests could be handled by our local supporters and me very well.

Knowing what to do if nothing works out

With this amount of participants, it probably was an acid test for the AWS employees supporting and co-organizing this GameDay. There were issues with the platform and the quests. Remember, 53 User Groups! Each have around 4 to 10 or more teams with 4 participants each. This means around 2000 participants accessing this platform all at once. As much as AWS and cloud computing is all about scale, you often only knew how things will go, when you have a high load.

There were issues, i.e. some quests were not validated anymore or tasks couldn’t be started or continued. Issues arose, issues were fixed. New issues arose. Not everything worked out fine. At some point, I was worried that the participants lost interest, because of being throttled by the failing quests, or having not much to do anymore. Luckily, we hadn’t a big issue with this at all. Still, I was amazed by how well it worked for our participants. They tried hard, using creative approaches to seek ways and test again. Side note here: This is a truly local experience. Other User Group Leaders reported to different feedback from their participants. So my learning is (and Joachim assured me on that) to not be that honest right away about possible issues at the time they were reported.

You probably think now, this sounds not very community-like or transparent! But think of this: Behind the scenes, the global GameDay organizers and AWS-employees observing the GameDay work hard on investigating and fixing the issues. For participants, it doesn’t matter if they wait 5 to 10 more minutes for a validation. Sometimes validations of quest results last even longer! So by asking for their patience, you won’t bring some negative experience to the event, rather than being honest with “platform has issues” or “platform is not working” etc.). Being honest can lead to more frustration than it has to be. The participants will look for the next possible quest to tackle or will work on things together if they are short on individual quests. Since they are eager to win, they are always try to find the next thing to work on.

Nevertheless, if no fix can be provided in a reasonable amount of time, it is important to be open about serious issues. The global organization team did provide general information about the health of the GameDay platform and the status of quests during the event. Sure, there is room for improvement, but I think it worked out fine on that day information-wise. Next time, an internal status board for User Group Leaders only would be really helpful to stay on top about issues or what’s going on behind the scenes.

Bringing together different levels of expertise

One additional thing I learned is before the event starts, organizers should focus on advice on how to collaborate within a team. Teams often consist of people who’ve never met before. We often tend to forget, that not all participants are working under the same conditions. Whether it is knowledge-wise or because of how they work on tasks. Some participants love to do things alone, some want to learn new things, some want to be the very best. Especially, if someone is in the group who never touched AWS or just started out, somebody needs to take some extra time explaining things, otherwise that newbie will lose interest or have a bad experience overall. Since everybody is so focused on solving the quests, they probably forget to first ask about how they want to tackle the task together. Giving some guidance will help them organize efficiently in their team and win. So next time, I want to prepare some printed out guide for each team with some advice on how to collaborate and organize themselves. This will surely help them to get the most out of the event and have fun together.

Choosing a partner for your event

I can’t stress enough what of a relief it is to have a sponsoring location partner, when planning for such an event. We were really glad having adesso on board for this event. In order to have a smooth running event with this specific setup, incorporate your location sponsor early. The GameDay preparation guide with its details on the needed location setup was super helpful! There were a few things we needed to have set up for the GameDay, like having

• a projector or screen to screen the event stream
• enough tables, chairs and power cords to host more than two or three teams
• enough Wi-Fi bandwidth for a larger amount of concurrent users
• drinks and snacks available (the cherry on top)

It doesn’t need to be a company, but it helps to have the support for location, drinks and foods. Some of the User Groups hosted their GameDay in a university or school. This has a charm on its own since it’s a direct connect to students who benefit from this typ of events a lot in my opinion.

And now?

I can’t wait for the next GameDay! I hope we can have another one in 2027. It’s such a fun format to learn new things and network with other cloud enthusiasts. I’d love to try a local GameDay with different topics in some of our next local meetups. Let’s see what the future holds.