Learn AWS Fundamentals in 30 Minutes

Hosted by Dr. Aki Wijesundara

Sat, Jan 17, 2026

10:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AWS Fundamentals for Building AI Systems
Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana
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What you'll learn

A practical overview of AWS

Understand what AWS is and how its core services fit together.

Core AWS building blocks

Learn the basics of compute, storage, networking, and managed services.

How modern applications run on AWS

See how apps, data, and AI workloads are deployed and scaled.

Key tradeoffs around cost, security, and reliability

Understand what impacts pricing, performance, and risk.

How to reason about AWS architectures

Build intuition for evaluating designs without deep implementation detail.

Why this topic matters

AWS is powerful but overwhelming. Many teams use it daily without a clear mental model. This session focuses on the fundamentals that actually matter, helping learners navigate AWS decisions and conversations more effectively.

You'll learn from

Dr. Aki Wijesundara

AI Founder | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI researcher, educator, and founder with a PhD in Machine Learning and experience at Google's AI Accelerator, where he contributed to advancing real-world applications of machine learning and large language models. As Co-Founder of Snapdrum, he helps organizations design, build, and deploy applied AI systems that move beyond prototypes to production-scale impact.

Aki has taught over 5,000+ engineers, founders, and product leaders worldwide how to build production-ready AI systems using LangChain, RAG pipelines, and MLOps frameworks.

He serves as AI Advisor to the United Nations, contributing expertise on responsible AI implementation and policy.

His work bridges cutting-edge research and practical implementation across text, voice, and multimodal AI.

Alongside Snapdrum, Aki serves as CTO of Krybe, an AI voice automation startup, and CTO of Tilli, an edtech company redefining how learners engage with AI-powered education.

Career highlights

  • Ex–Google AI Accelerator researcher focused on responsible AI and applied ML.
  • PhD in AI & Cognitive Systems with published research across top universities.
  • Former researcher with teams affiliated with MIT, University of Oxford, & King’s College London.
  • Co-founder of Snapdrum — delivered AI systems for finance, education, and healthcare.
  • Built and deployed AI product pipelines used by PMs, startups, and enterprise teams.
  • Instructor for multiple AI builder programs, helping 500+ professionals ship AI features fast.

Previous Students from

Google
Meta
Amazon Web Services
NVIDIA
OpenAI

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