Guest Writer: Jodie Buggea, Software Developer at PastView.
On April 30th, some of our technical team travelled to London for AWS Summit 2025 - an event full of innovation, collaboration, and visions of the future. As a company working at the intersection of technology and heritage, the Summit was both inspiring and deeply relevant to the work we do in supporting archival and information experts.
The AWS Summit is an event held at the ExCeL centre in London, bringing together thousands of cloud professionals, developers, and business leaders to explore the latest in cloud innovation. This year, it hosted over 90 sessions covering topics like generative AI, serverless computing, and sustainability, alongside interactive demos and workshops. The event featured keynote addresses from AWS executives and industry leaders, providing insights into how AWS services are transforming businesses.
The keynote set the tone for the whole day, focusing on building securely, sustainably, and with performance in mind - a particularly relevant message as data and AI become ever more intertwined. AWS leaders showed how its customers are accelerating digital transformation, reducing costs, and imagining new possibilities. They also highlighted the practical tools to get there.
Through PastView, we continue our mission to help cultural institutions, archives, and heritage organisations convert physical collections into accessible, searchable digital repositories -and what we saw at the Summit validated that the AWS tools we use are moving in the right direction.
For archival professionals, that means more time can be spent curating stories, rather than manually managing systems. And for us, it means continuing to deliver a platform that’s efficient, reliable, and future-ready.
It wasn’t all tech talk and breakout sessions - the Sports Zone, complete with machine learning informed challenges (and a slide between floors), reminded us all that innovation can be both playful and purposeful!
For me, the Sustainability Zone was a personal standout - a thought-provoking space highlighting how technology can help understand the natural world around us and reduce environmental impact. This included talks from key players in the industry, including the Natural History Museum.
Attending AWS Summit London left us excited about what’s possible - not just for the future of cloud computing, but for how we preserve and share our past. With PastView, we’re proud to be part of this evolving landscape, helping heritage organisations embrace the digital world with confidence.