AWS Community GameDay Europe on the 17/03 ! Think You Know AWS? Come Prove It
Anatomy of what happens when 50+ Cities Play at Once by Jérôme Vanhoutte! What is it. What do to before and what happen during and after !
TL;DR
What is it? A team-based, hands-on AWS challenge event. Your team gets dropped into a broken AWS environment, misconfigured services, failing architectures, security gaps , and you have two hours to fix as much as you can. It's not a conference. It's not a workshop. It's not a hackathon. It's something else entirely.
When? Tuesday, March 17th, 2026. Most UG open the doors open at 17:30 CET , but check your local usergroup when signing up, event starts at 18:00 CET sharp simultaneously across all of Europe.
Where? 50+ cities across Europe, all connected through a live stream and a single pan-European leaderboard. Find your nearest city on the map below and on the gameday website 👉 https://www.awsgameday.eu/
🏆 Grand Prize: The winning team takes home $1,000 in AWS Credits, an AWS Certification Exam Voucher each, an exclusive AWS Community Hoodie each, and the crown jewel: a one-of-a-kind 3D-printed Unicorn figurine to sit on your desk and stare at your colleagues. Think your team has what it takes to claim it across 50+ cities?
Who is it for? Everyone. Whether you've been building on AWS for years or you're just getting started. The challenges scale across skill levels, teams are up to 4 people, and no prior GameDay experience is needed.
How do I join? Find your nearest participating city and register through your local AWS User Group: 👉 https://www.awsgameday.eu/
🎬 Want to see what a GameDay actually looks like? Check out this video:
👋 Meet the AWS Community GameDay Organizers
The AWS Community GameDay is made possible by a passionate team of 8 User Group Leaders from across Europe who volunteer their time to make it happen :
- Anda-Cătălina Giraud : AWS User Group Geneva
- Andreas Rütten : AWS User Group Bonn
- Jérôme Vanhoutte : AWS User Group Belgium
- Linda Mohamed : AWS User Group Vienna (AWS Hero)
- Lucian Pătian : AWS User Group Timișoara
- Manuel Vogel : AWS User Group Frankfurt
- Marcel Drechsler : AWS User Group Muensterland
- Mihaly Balassy : AWS User Group Budapest
Now, if you want the full picture of what to expect before, during, and after
I'm Jérôme , I'm organizing this thing across Europe with my teammates, and here's what I wish someone had told me! ⚡
⚡Before: The Weeks Leading Up
You get an email from your local AWS User Group. "GameDay is in two weeks. Sign up." You Google it. You find a website. You wonder if you're experienced enough.
Here's the honest answer: probably yes. And the only way to find out is to show up.
AWS Community GameDay Europe takes place on March 17th, 2026, simultaneously across 50+ European cities. Same challenges. Same clock. One pan-European leaderboard. It's organized not by AWS corporate, but by the AWS User Groups that run meetups in your city , which means it has a completely different energy than a polished conference session.
Before you walk in, a few things worth knowing:
- You don't need an AWS account. A sandboxed environment is provided on the day. You show up, you get credentials, you start building.
- You do need a laptop. Charged. With your preferred browser and ideally the AWS CLI installed. That's the full tech checklist.
For preparation, the most useful investment of your time is not reading documentation. It's getting comfortable navigating the AWS console under pressure. Spin up a few services you haven't used before. Break something intentionally and fix it. The muscle memory matters more than theoretical knowledge.
If you want to be purposeful about it, brush up on these areas that tend to show up across GameDay scenarios:
- IAM and permissions : misconfigured roles are a classic challenge vector
- CloudWatch and logging : knowing where to look when something is wrong is half the battle
- Lambda, API Gateway, and serverless basics useful for cloud-native challenge tracks
- Amazon Bedrock and basic LLM integration : relevant to AI challenge scenarios
- VPC networking fundamentals , security groups, NACLs, routing
You don't need to master all of these. Even one area of depth on your team covers ground.
🦄 During: The Event Itself
Doors open at 17:30 CET. Teams form by 17:45 CET. The stream start at 18:00 CET and the game starts at 18:30 sharp, simultaneously, across every city in Europe.
There's a live stream connecting all locations. A leaderboard. And a shared atmosphere of controlled chaos that's hard to describe until you've been in it.
The challenges drop you into a live AWS environment that's broken in interesting ways. Maybe a service is misconfigured. Maybe there's a security gap you need to find and close. Maybe an architecture is failing under load and your team needs to diagnose and fix it.
Points are awarded as you solve each challenge. Teams work through as many as they can before time runs out.
A few dynamics to know !
- Divide the work early : The teams that do well tend to split into parallel tracks quickly, one person investigates the environment, another reads the challenge documentation, another starts making changes. Sitting together and taking turns doesn't scale.
- Read the challenge text carefully : The instructions often contain hints. Rushing straight to the console and clicking around randomly costs time.
- Ask for help without guilt : There are organizers and AWS community members in the room whose job on the night is to unblock you, not to judge you. Use them.
- Don't spiral on one challenge : If you've been stuck for 20 minutes, note what you've tried and move on. More points exist elsewhere.
The leaderboard is visible throughout the event. It's competitive but not cutthroat -- the room tends to have a collaborative energy despite the competition. People help each other between challenges. That's the community part.
🏆After: What You Take Home
The formal event ends after roughly two hours. There's a closing ceremony, results are announced, and the live stream wraps up across all cities.
What stays with you is harder to quantify. Sure, you'll have touched AWS services you'd never have explored on your own. You'll have debugged under real pressure, which builds a kind of confidence no tutorial can give you.
But honestly? That's not the part people remember most.
For me it's the moment your teammate shouts "I found it!" and the whole table erupts. It's high-fiving a stranger you met 90 minutes ago. It's the feeling of solving something together that none of you could have cracked alone. You'll walk out with new connections that started under pressure and those tend to stick. Some of the strongest friendships in this community were born at a GameDay.
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