AWS Summit London 2026 Highlights

Following my attendance at the AWS Porto User Group meetup in Braga last week, I participated in AWS Summit London 2026 this week.

The event was held at Excel London, located right next to London City Airport. I was worried about transportation since the event coincided with a public transport strike, but fortunately, I arrived on time. Although I had to walk more using a route unaffected by the strike, it was actually nice to walk along Royal Victoria Dock, an artificial harbor canal branching off from the Thames River near the venue.

Despite the early hour, the venue entrance was extremely crowded with people picking up their badges. Previous events had over 20,000 attendees, which is significantly larger than the Seoul Summit. While the Seoul event typically runs over two days, the London Summit is a one-day event, making it feel even more crowded with all participants arriving at once.

After badge pickup, there was a tube-shaped corridor that seemed to visualize the message of AWS accelerating customer success with AI Run-Ready capabilities.

Right after getting my badge, I headed to the main auditorium for the keynote, the highlight of the event. The keynote was conducted in a unique setup, with the main stage surrounded by the audience like a fighting arena. Starting with Alison Kay (UK/IRE VP & Managing Director), various speakers explained how AWS understands customer needs for AI models and AI Agent utilization, removes barriers between imagination and reality, and rapidly transforms actual industrial sites.

Two customer case studies presented in the keynote were particularly impressive.

1. Octopus Energy

• Rigid enterprise software vs. Volatile reality
• Emphasized market uncertainty and limitations of plan-centric strategies through past energy industry examples
• Building a platform that can continuously change is more important than completed features
• Intentionally bet on building a monolithic cloud-native platform on AWS 10 years ago (prioritizing speed of change)
• Currently selling their Kraken platform as SaaS overseas, with customers in Korea (Hanwha Energy)

2. Motorway

• Keynote by Senior Engineer Ryan Cormack, an AWS Community Builder
• Shared a case study of adopting Kiro in their organization to improve development speed and quality
• Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, appeared mid-presentation to congratulate the achievement and presented a t-shirt to the speaker

At the upcoming AWS Summit Seoul 2026 in May, AWS Hero Jaehyun Shin and AWS Community Builder Mintae Kim will also take the keynote stage, and I'm looking forward to their presentations.

After the keynote, I attended sessions of interest and explored various areas of the venue. Photos from the event are compiled at the end of this post.

Although I cannot attend AWS Summit Seoul this year due to scheduling conflicts, attending the London Summit filled that gap. AWS Summit Seoul 2026 will be held at COEX for two days, May 20-21, where you can explore the latest AI strategies and various customer cases and achievements across different industries.

In particular, the community track prepared by the AWS Korea User Group features high-quality sessions, so I highly recommend registering to participate.

AWS Summit London 2026 Highlights