I’ve been passionate about working with and learning about AWS technologies since I dipped my toe with my first ACloudGuru course at the beginning of 2017.
Since then I’ve been on a learning journey, both from a training and certification point of view (see My Journey to AWS ‘All 12’), as well as honing my skills working with customers on building outs of Landing Zones, migration to the cloud and building born in the cloud applications, as well as being involved in the development of Atos’ Digital Cloud Services AWS capability, our Landing Zone as a Service, complete with OS and RDS management capabilities, providing an environment allowing our customers and developers to migrate and create in AWS with solid, secure foundations.
In the summer of 2020 I launched our Atos AWS Coaching Hub to support others on their path, with the aim of helping people find and consume the training material that’d been so beneficial to me to help them get certified (most would consider this table stakes these days), and help them bridge the gap from there to being effective working with our customers.
As I took more of an active role internally within Atos’ AWS community and working with our AWS Partner SAs I became aware of the AWS Partner Network Ambassador programme, which is open to employees of organisations who are part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) who meet certain criteria (a number of pro / specialty certifications), as well as contribute externally to the AWS community (e.g. blog posts, open source repos, arranging public community events). I realised that whilst I met the certification requirements I lacked the external contributions to qualify, as whilst I was doing fair amount internally, publishing stuff externally was somewhat outside my comfort zone.
I set myself a goal of achieving AWS Ambassador status over the next 6–9 months by pushing myself outside of my comfort zone to do more things externally, which have culminated in my blog and open source Github organisation, in the process going from someone who didn’t naturally share information externally to someone who’s now a lot more comfortable doing it (there’s no compression algorithm for experience and all that I guess).
Ok, I’ve made you wait long enough on the backstory, if you’ve made it this far I guess this is why you’re really here, what are the benefits, that’s the important bit right? I’d say there are benefits both for the AWS Ambassador, as well as their employer and of course some of these benefits overlap. The AWS Ambassador certainly gets some externally visible kudos on the AWS website, (particularly if your first name starts ‘Aa…’) and when you’re introduced to customers and to colleagues at AWS it carries some weight. There are goodies (which I imagine are subject to change) which in my first year have involved AWS Ambassador Swag, free invite to re:Invent and AWS Ambassador summit at Amazon in Seattle, and I’ve had a couple of $500 credits to apply to my AWS account for tinkering (helps when producing open source projects!). There’s been some preferential access to AWS product teams to get product roadmap overviews (under NDA of course), as well as perks like reserved seating for keynote speeches and a slack channel to communicate with AWS Ambassador aligned staff as well as other ambassadors, to ask where people have hit similar problems you might be facing. As a side effect of the programme encouraging more external content I’ve also grown my presence externally and have content available for re-use but also shows I can ‘walk’ as well as ‘talk’, which may set me apart compared with those that don’t have a body of work or thoughts they’ve shared.
If you’re interested in becoming an AWS Ambassador you should reach out to your partner SA. If you don’t work for an APN Partner feel free to check out roles on our website so you can meet the first requirement —http:// jobs.atos.net. If you want to talk to me about becoming an AWS Ambassador on a one to one basis feel free to reach out.
