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Speaking at AWS User Group Lao: Comfort Lost, Insight Gained

I gave the opening talk at the AWS User Group Lao Q3 2026 meetup, about what I lost and what I learned building awsug.la on AWS after years on ship-fast platforms.

Vientiane, 12 September 2026. I gave the opening talk at the AWS User Group Lao Q3 meetup at MakerBox Lao. The talk was called Comfort Lost, Insight Gained: Lessons from Migrating to AWS. It was about what I gave up, and what I learned, when I built awsug.la on AWS instead of on the platforms I usually use.

Ketsadaphone presenting at AWS User Group Lao, next to a screen showing the awsug.la website

The meetup

This quarter's theme was the path to becoming a solo entrepreneur with AWS. Like every AWS User Group Lao event, it was free, in person and taught mainly in Lao. The goal is to lower the barriers to learning cloud skills in Laos, and to give students, developers and IT people in Vientiane a place to meet each other.

There were two sessions that afternoon:

  1. Comfort Lost, Insight Gained, my talk on moving from "git push and done" platforms to building everything yourself on AWS.
  2. From Code to Production by Lenglee Vaja (Software Engineer, Lailaolab), on what happens after you deploy: monitoring and observability, security, cost optimization and high availability on AWS.

Ketsadaphone speaking into a microphone beside the slide "awsug.la — the thing this talk is about"

What the talk was about

Since 2019 I've mostly shipped on Vercel, Cloudflare, Supabase and Appwrite. You push to a branch and get a URL. Before this project I had never really fought with the AWS console.

Then AWS User Group Lao needed a real website. It had to announce meetups, take free registrations, issue QR tickets, check people in at the door, publish recaps in Lao and English, and give volunteer organisers a backoffice. It also needed to be a reference architecture we could present to the community. That became awsug.la, and it was built on AWS from the very first commit.

Nothing was ported. What migrated was me.

Ketsadaphone gesturing toward the audience while presenting

The audience shaped the architecture

The site is built for developers and students around Vientiane, many on mid-range Android phones using Lao mobile data. Lao is the default language and English lives under /en. Registration works even with JavaScript turned off.

That one requirement made the app server-rendered. Server rendering is what made Lambda behind CloudFront a sensible choice later on.

Comfort lost

  • A first deploy that takes ~90 seconds on Vercel took 20–35 minutes on AWS (Aurora, certificate and DNS validation, CloudFront). Later deploys still take 2–4 minutes.
  • No more free preview URL for every pull request.
  • No logs, errors or dashboards unless I set them up myself.
  • New questions I'd never had to answer: VPC placement, trust policies, which token type to verify.

Insight gained

  • Cost depends on your architecture. I set a budget of $180 a year before I wrote any infrastructure. Using AWS list prices, two full environments (production and staging) come to about $150 a year: around $6 in a quiet month and about $19 in a month with an event.
  • Decisions that paid off: Lambda stays outside the VPC, Aurora Serverless v2 scales to zero, and uploads are served from the same origin. Each function gets its own IAM permissions instead of sharing one key.
  • "I configured it" is not the same as "it works." Writing the runbook turned up six defects that only existed between local and deployed.
  • AI agents speed you up, but you still own the result. I built the project with an AI agent. It wrote consistent code, tests and docs. It didn't know about the bugs that only show up once you deploy to AWS.

Ketsadaphone presenting to the room, with attendees and laptops in the foreground

The verdict

Ship-fast platforms still win on speed, preview environments and day-one observability. AWS won on cost that scales to zero, one account and one bill, and having nothing to outgrow.

The only recommendation in the talk was this: I would do it again for this project. I would not do it by default.

Wide view of the meetup room, with an attendee in an AWS User Group Lao shirt in the foreground

After the talk

Some of the best parts of the day came after the slides were done: talking with attendees, swapping stories about deploys and bills, and meeting people who are just starting with cloud.

Ketsadaphone talking with two attendees in front of the colourful murals at MakerBox Lao

Ketsadaphone and attendees chatting after the session

Ketsadaphone receiving a thank-you gift from an organiser in front of the "Thank you" slide

What I'm taking away

Giving a talk made me explain every trade-off out loud to people who are new to AWS. That turned out to be a better review than anything I did alone. If you can't explain why something costs what it costs, you don't really understand it yet.

The other lesson is about community. A small, free, Lao-first meetup is exactly the room where someone can see cloud for the first time and leave thinking "I could build that."

Group photo of speakers and attendees at the AWS User Group Lao Q3 2026 meetup

Resources

Thank you to the AWS User Group Lao organisers, MakerBox Lao for hosting, Lenglee for the second session, and everyone who came and asked questions.