One URL, One Stack, One Workshop: From Idea to Platform in Two Weeks with Kiro

All too often at hands-on workshops, there’s a segment of the attendees who are impeded because they encounter issues: They don’t have the rights to install software. They have something installed that generates conflicts. They don’t have sufficient AWS access. Whatever the issue, it translates into time being spent troubleshooting and not being spent on the workshop’s learning objective.  This doesn’t address the extra work required by the organizer, nor the potential confusion with attendees, when you have multiple versions of workshop to account for different operating systems and different coding languages.

AWS facilitated workshops can take advantage of special environments which are well suited to most workshops.  However, if an organizer wants to facilitate a custom workshop, connect to company resources, or otherwise are unable to take advantage of AWS provided workshop accounts, organizers are on their own to provide a platform for their workshop.

The Kiro Workshop Platform addresses this need while keeping these goals in mind:

·       Keep it simple

·       Keep it secure

·       Keep it self-contained

As a CloudFormation-based platform, an organizer launches the template in their AWS account using only a source URL and selecting a few options.  No installation, no coding – copy, paste and go.  The stack spins up a pre-configured workshop environment for each attendee.  These environments include Kiro (the agentic IDE) running on EC2 instances, accessed via a browser.  The organizer can elect to customize the EC2 environment, as well as include pre-configured AWS resources specific to their workshop.

Workshop Central, a serverless web app running inside the workshop account, provides the organizer an easy way to manage the instances (including saving costs by shutting them down until the start of the workshop). 

Workshop Central also distributes workshop information to each participant, alleviating the organizer from having to manually distribute credentials.  Under the covers, it also keeps security configurations lined up – another bonus for organizers.

When the workshop is over, click “delete stack” and the resources spun up by the workshop platform are removed. (If participants create resources, you’ll want them to clean those up.)

The San Antonio AWS User Group ran a successful Kiro workshop using the platform last week.  I’d like to find a few more “beta” testers before making this more broadly available.  If you’re interested, please DM me on LinkedIn.

This post kicks off a series covering the architecture, security, IaC approach and other internals, as well as the experience of using Kiro to build this platform.  Stay tuned.

Bottom line - the Kiro Workshop Platform allows organizers to focus on the workshop, not the preparation of the base workshop environment.