The Only Secure Keys are the ones you don’t have

Tēnā Koutou AWS Christchurch Community,

Overview:
Welcome back to the AWS User Group Christchurch Meetup Series.
Join us for an insightful session exploring one of the most persistent challenges in modern cloud security: managing credentials securely at scale. As organisations continue to adopt cloud-native platforms and automation, traditional approaches to managing access keys, secrets, and SSH credentials introduce unnecessary operational overhead and security risk.
This meetup will demonstrate how modern identity federation and keyless access patterns can eliminate long-lived credentials from your workflows, improving both security and developer experience.

Venue details:
Special gratitude to MadeCurious for providing the venue for the event.
100 Carlyle Street, Sydenham, Christchurch 8023

Agenda:
5:30 PM – Doors Open, Networking
6:00 PM – Talk Track – Simon Merrick – “The Only Secure Keys are the Ones You Don’t Have”
7:00 PM – Wrap Up, Networking, Fun, Pizza

Meetup Talk Track:
🎤 Speaker Simon Merrick will explore the challenges, risks, and operational realities of managing credentials in modern cloud environments. From compromised access keys to the burden of secret rotation and lifecycle management, traditional credential-based access remains one of the largest attack surfaces in cloud platforms.
In this session, Simon will demonstrate how OpenID Connect (OIDC) can be used to securely authenticate GitHub and GitLab workloads into AWS and Google Cloud without storing long-lived credentials. He will also showcase how AWS Systems Manager (SSM) can be combined with Ansible to deliver keyless configuration management for EC2 instances, removing the need for SSH keys while improving security, auditability, and operational simplicity.
Whether you’re building CI/CD pipelines, managing infrastructure as code, or looking to reduce credential sprawl across your organisation, this talk will provide practical patterns and real-world examples you can take back to your own environments.

About the Speaker:
Simon Merrick is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer based in Christchurch with extensive experience building and securing cloud-native platforms and infrastructure. He is passionate about the intersection of software delivery, security, and platform engineering, with a particular focus on helping teams deliver software safely, securely, and efficiently. Simon is an active contributor to the New Zealand technology community and regularly shares his expertise on DevOps, cloud security, and software delivery practices. (Code Camp Wellington 2026)

We look forward to seeing you at the meetup!
Mā te wā.