Hey everyone! 
For a while now, I’ve been wondering… Why doesn’t Sydney have an OpenSearch User Group? There are so many great OpenSearch communities around the world, and it felt like Sydney was missing one.
Then came the big question… If we started one… would anyone actually show up? Well… they did! We had around 30 people join us for our very first Sydney OpenSearch User Group meetup, and it was so good meeting everyone. It was great to see engineers, architects and OpenSearch users from different companies all in one room, sharing ideas and talking about the challenges they’re solving.
Since this was our first meetup, we didn’t really know the audience. So we kept the talks broad, hoping there would be something that everyone could relate to.
I spoke about Observability with OpenSearch and some of the challenges we’re seeing as modern applications generate more telemetry.
Mehri then walked us through how Atlassian right-sizes hundreds of OpenSearch clusters, sharing practical lessons from operating OpenSearch at scale.
Ryan shared how Atlassian architects blue/green OpenSearch deployments on Kubernetes, giving everyone a behind-the-scenes look at how they run OpenSearch in production.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a meetup without 
pizza, a quiz, some OpenSearch swag, and plenty of networking!
One thing that really stood out from the feedback was that people want more demos and deeper technical content. That’s great feedback, and we’ll definitely bring more hands-on demos to future meetups.
A huge thank you to everyone who came along, our speakers from Atlassian for sharing their experience, AWS for hosting us, and everyone who helped make our first Sydney meetup happen.
This is just the beginning, and we’re already looking forward to the next Sydney OpenSearch User Group meetup!
Here are a few highlights from the evening.
