Category: AWS Community Heroes

The AWS Community Heroes program seeks to recognize and honor the most engaged Amazon Web Services developers who have had a positive impact in the global community.  If you are interested in learning more about the AWS Community Heroes program or curious about ways to get involved with your local AWS community, please click the graphic below to see the AWS Heroes talk directly about the program.

Now that you know more about the AWS Community Hero program, I am elated to introduce to you all the latest AWS Heroes to join the fold:

• Ben Kehoe
• Joshua Levy
• Marcia Villalba
• Michael Ezzell
• Thanos Baskous
• Rob Gruhl

These guys and gals impart their passion for AWS and cloud technologies with the technical community by sharing their time and knowledge across social media and via in-person events.

Ben Kehoe

Ben Kehoe works in the field of Cloud Robotics—using the internet to enable robots to do more and better things—an area of IoT involving computation in the cloud and at the edge, Big Data, and machine learning. Approaching cloud computing from this angle, Ben focuses on developing business value rapidly through serverless (and service full) applications.

At iRobot, Ben guided the transition to a serverless architecture on AWS based on AWS Lambda and AWS IoT to support iRobot’s connected robot fleet. This architecture enables iRobot to focus on its core mission of building amazing robots with a minimum of development and operations effort.

Ben seeks to amplify voices from dev, operations, and security to help the community shape the evolution of serverless and event-driven designs for IoT and cloud computing more broadly.

Marcia Villalba

Marcia is a Senior Full-stack Developer at Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds. She is originally from Uruguay but has been living in Finland for almost a decade.

She has been designing and developing software professionally for over 10 years. For more than four years she has been working with AWS, including the past year which she’s worked mostly with serverless technologies.

Marcia runs her own YouTube channel, in which she publishes at least one new video every week. In her channel, she focuses on teaching how to use AWS serverless technologies and managed services. In addition to her professional work, she is the Tech Lead in “Girls in Tech” Helsinki, helping to inspire more women to enter into technology and programming.

Joshua Levy

Joshua Levy is an entrepreneur, engineer, writer, and serial startup technologist and advisor in cloud, AI, search, and startup scaling.

He co-founded the Open Guide to AWS, which is one of the most popular AWS resources and communities on the web. The collaborative project welcomes new contributors or editors, and anyone who wishes to ask or answer questions.

Josh has years of experience in hands-on software engineering and leadership at fast-growing consumer and enterprise startups, including Viv Labs (acquired by Samsung) and BloomReach (where he led engineering and AWS infrastructure), and a background in AI and systems research at SRI and mathematics at Berkeley. He has a passion for improving how we share knowledge on complex engineering, product, or business topics. If you share any of these interests, reach out on Twitter or find his contact details on GitHub.

Michael Ezzell

Michael Ezzell is a frequent contributor of detailed, in-depth solutions to questions spanning a wide variety of AWS services on Stack Overflow and other sites on the Stack Exchange Network.

Michael is the resident DBA and systems administrator for Online Rewards, a leading provider of web-based employee recognition, channel incentive, and customer loyalty programs, where he was a key player in the company’s full transition to the AWS platform.

Based in Cincinnati, and known to coworkers and associates as “sqlbot,” he also provides design, development, and support services to freelance consulting clients for AWS services and MySQL, as well as, broadcast & cable television and telecommunications technologies.

Thanos Baskous

Thanos Baskous is a San Francisco-based software engineer and entrepreneur who is passionate about designing and building scalable and robust systems.

He co-founded the Open Guide to AWS, which is one of the most popular AWS resources and communities on the web.

At Twitter, he built infrastructure that allows engineers to seamlessly deploy and run their applications across private data centers and public cloud environments. He previously led a team at TellApart (acquired by Twitter) that built an internal platform-as-a-service (Docker, Apache Aurora, Mesos on AWS) in support of a migration from a monolithic application architecture to a microservice-based architecture. Before TellApart, he co-founded AWS-hosted AdStack (acquired by TellApart) in order to automatically personalize and improve the quality of content in marketing emails and email newsletters.

Rob Gruhl

Rob is a senior engineering manager located in Seattle, WA. He supports a team of talented engineers at Nordstrom Technology exploring and deploying a variety of serverless systems to production.

From the beginning of the serverless era, Rob has been exclusively using serverless architectures to allow a small team of engineers to deliver incredible solutions that scale effortlessly and wake them in the middle of the night rarely. In addition to a number of production services, together with his team Rob has created and released two major open source projects and accompanying open source workshops using a 100% serverless approach. He’d love to talk with you about serverless, event-sourcing, and/or occasionally-connected distributed data layers.

Feel free to follow these great AWS Heroes on Twitter and check out their blogs. It is exciting to have them all join the AWS Community Heroes program.

–  Tara

We would like to extend a very warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes:

• Mark Nunnikhoven
• SangUk Park
• James Hall
• Drew Firment

AWS Community Heroes share their knowledge and demonstrate their enthusiasm for AWS in a plethora of ways. They go above and beyond to share AWS insights via social media, blog posts, open source projects, and through in-person events, user groups, and workshops.

Mark Nunnikhoven
Mark Nunnikhoven explores the impact of technology on individuals, organizations, and communities through the lens of privacy and security. Asking the question, “How can we better protect our information?” Mark studies the world of cybercrime to better understand the risks and threats to our digital world.

As the Vice President of Cloud Research at Trend Micro, a long time Amazon Web Services Advanced Technology Partner and provider of security tools for the AWS Cloud, Mark uses that knowledge to help organizations around the world modernize their security practices by taking advantage of the power of the AWS Cloud.

With a strong focus on automation, he helps bridge the gap between DevOps and traditional security through his writing, speaking, teaching, and by engaging with the AWS community.

SangUk Park
SangUk Park is a Chief Solutions Architect at Megazone, which became Korea’s first AWS Partner in 2012 and is the only AWS Premier Consulting Partner to provide AWS support in Korean.

He served as a System Architect for KT’s public cloud and VDI design, and led the system operation of YDOnline and Nexon Japan, one of the leading online gaming companies. Certified both as an AWS Solutions Architect – Professional and AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional, SangUk has authored AWS books, including DevOps and AWS Cloud Design Patterns, and translated four books related to the AWS Cloud.

He’s been making efforts to revitalize the local AWS Korea User Group community as co-leader by presenting at AWS Korea User Group meetings and AWS Summits, and helping to establish small group gatherings such as the AWSKRUG System Engineers in Gangnam. Also, he has done many hands-on labs and has been running a booth as a leader of the user groups at AWS events to cultivate developers and system engineers.

SangUk maintains a close relationship with the Japanese AWS User Group (JAWS UG), using his excellent Japanese communication skills and experiences in Japan. He makes every effort to participate in events held between Japanese and Korean user groups as a facilitator and translator, and will promote cross-regional communications beyond APAC going forward.

James Hall
James Hall has been working in the digital sector for over a decade. He is the author of the popular jsPDF library, and is a founder/Director of Parallax, a digital agency in the UK. He’s worked as a software developer on a wide variety of projects, from LED Billboards, car unlocking apps, to large web applications and tools.

Parallax built an online recording studio for David Guetta and UEFA using Serverless technology shortly after API Gateway was released. Since then they have consulted on various serverless projects and technologies. They run the AWS Meetup in Leeds, and help companies around the world build their businesses online. James has contributed to and promotes the Serverless Framework which allows you to elegantly build web applications on top of Lambda and related services.

Drew Firment
Drew Firment works with business leaders and technology teams from organizations that seek to accelerate cloud adoption. He has over twenty years of experience leading large-scale technology programs, enterprise platforms, and cultural transformations in a fast-paced agile environment.

After migrating Capital One’s early adopters of AWS into production, his focus shifted toward accelerating a scaleable and sustainable transition to cloud computing. Drew pioneered the intersection of strategy, governance, engineering, agile, and education to drive an enterprise-wide talent transformation. He founded Capital One’s cloud engineering college, and implemented an innovative outcome-based curriculum oriented towards learning communities. Several thousand employees have enrolled in his cloud-fluency program, enabling well over 1,000 AWS certifications since its inception.

Drew has earned all three of the AWS associate-level certifications, enjoys developing custom Amazon Alexa skills using AWS Lambda, and believes serverless is the future of cloud computing. He also serves as an advisory partner to A Cloud Guru and is editor-in-chief of the their community-sourced publication.

Welcome
Please join me in welcoming to our newest AWS Community Heroes!

-Ana

AWS Community Heroes are members of the AWS Community that share their knowledge and demonstrate outstanding enthusiasm for AWS. They do this in a variety of ways including user groups, social media, meetups and workshops. Today we extend a Happy Holiday welcome to the last of the 2016 cohort of AWS Heroes:

• Ayumi Tada
• Shimon Tolts

In November all the AWS Community Heroes were invited to reInvent and got a chance to join us for a private event for Heroes on Monday evening. The final two Heroes of the 2016 cohort were surprised with an invitation on Monday morning of reInvent week to join the Hero community. They were both able to join us at the event on short notice and were able to meet the other Heroes.

It is great to have all of the #AWS Community Heroes at #Reinvent pic.twitter.com/PfV6yVgPwf — Werner Vogels (@Werner) November 29, 2016

Ayumi Tada

Ayumi Tada works at Honda Motor Co. in Japan as an IT infrastructure strategist, promoting the utilization of cloud computing technologies. She also promotes cloud utilization in the CAE/HPC area at JAMA (Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association).

Previously, she worked at Honda R&D as an IT System Administrator, focused on using cloud for High Performance Computing (HPC), including an engineering simulation system (Computer Aided Engineering / CAE), and introduced the use case of HPC on AWS at re:Invent 2014. Currently, she is promoting cloud utilization in a wide range of Enterprise applications.

Ayumi is a member of JAWS-UG (Japan AWS User Group). JAWS-UG was started in 2010, and has over 50+ branches, 100+ leaders, 300+ meetup events per year, and 4000+ members. She is a one of the launch leads of new JAWS branches for HPC specialists and for beginners. She is also a one of the organizers of the JAWS for women branch and participates in other local branches including Kumamoto & JAWS for Enterprises (E-JAWS) meetup events.

Ayumi has an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification, she is a Career Development Adviser through the National Career Development Centers’ international partner organization, and she has a BS in Electrical & Electronic Engineering and Information Engineering from Waseda University.

Shimon Tolts

Shimon Tolts has been fascinated by computers since he was eight. When he got his first PC, he immediately started tearing it apart to understand how the different parts were connected to each other. Later, Linux and open source software also had a strong influence, and Shimon started his first company at the age of 15, providing web hosting on top of Linux servers in the pre-cloud era.

During his military service, Shimon served as a Computer Crimes Investigator & Forensics Analyst at the Center Unit for Special Investigations, helping him succeed in a role at Intel Security following his service.

In 2013 Shimon joined ironSource, to establish the R&D infrastructure division. One of the most innovative solutions developed was a Big Data pipeline that was used to stream hundreds of billions of monthly events from different ironSource divisions into Redshift in near real-time. After receiving requests for his solution by the tech community, this solution was released publicly as ATOM DATA.

Shimon leads the Israeli AWS user group and is a regular speaker at Big Data conferences, from AWS Summits to Pop-up Lofts.

-Ana

I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes:

• Cyrus Wong
• Paul Duvall
• Vit Niennattrakul
• Habeeb Rahman
• Francisco Edilton
• Jeevan Dongre

The Heroes share their knowledge and demonstrate their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blog posts, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more.

Cyrus Wong
Based in Hong Kong, Cyrus is a Data Scientist in the IT Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education. He actively promotes the use of AWS at live events and via social media, and has received multiple awards for his AWS-powered Data Science and Machine Learning Projects.

Cyrus provides professional AWS training to students in Hong Kong, with an eye toward certification. One of his most popular blog posts is How to get all AWS Certifications in Asia, where he recommends watching the entire set of re:Invent videos at a 2.0 to 2.5x speedup!

You can connect with Cyrus on LinkedIn or at a meeting of the AWS Hong Kong User Group.

Paul Duvall
As co-founder and CTO of Stelligent (an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner), Paul has been using AWS to implement Continuous Delivery Systems since 2009.

Based in Northern Virginia, he’s an AWS Certified SysOps Administrator and and AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and has been designing, implementing, and managing software and systems for over 20 years. Paul has written over 30 articles on AWS, automation, and DevOps and is currently writing a book on Enterprise DevOps in AWS.

You can connect with Paul on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter, or read his posts on the Stelligent Blog.

Vit Niennattrakul
Armed with a Ph.D. in time series data mining and passionate about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing, Vit is a consummate entrepreneur who has already founded four companies including Dailitech, an AWS Consulting Partner. They focus on cloud migration and cloud-native applications, and have also created cloud-native solutions for their customers.

Shortly after starting to use AWS in 2013, Vit decided that it could help to drive innovation in Thailand. In order to make this happen, he founded the AWS User Group Thailand and has built it up to over 2,000 members.

I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes:

• Ryan Kroonenburg
• Aleksandar Nenov
• Markus Ostertag
• Cliff Lu

The Heroes share their knowledge and demonstrate their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blog posts, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more.

Ryan Kroonenburg
Ryan is a UK-based Solutions Architect and the founder of A Cloud Guru, a community which is dedicated to teaching all aspects of the AWS platform. Together with his brother Sam, Ryan has taught AWS to over 50,000 students. They also designed one of the first Serverless Learning Management Systems and help to organize serverless conferences and meetups all over the world. Ryan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting & Finance from Australia’s Curtin University. He has also earned multiple IT certifications (ITILv3, MCITP, and MSSQL DBA to name a few) and four AWS certificates.

You can connect with Ryan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

Aleksandar Nenov
Aleksandar is a Senior IT professional. He focuses on cloud operations and managed AWS services. He has a deep understanding of AWS from the business, technical, and service management perspectives. He has been using AWS since 2009, when he began to help dozens of small and large businesses move their operations to the AWS cloud. Aleksandar is the CEO and founder of CLOUDWEBOPS, the first APN Consulting Partner in Serbia and Southeast Europe. He created AWS User Group Serbia and has grown it to over 300 members, and has inspired AWS enthusiasts in Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina to create similar groups of their own.

His proudest achievement to date is his direct involvement in AWSome Day SEE, a free introductory event hosted by AWS experts. The event drew over 250 participants from Serbia, along with guests from Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.

Connect with Aleksandar on LinkedIn to learn more.

Markus Ostertag
As Head of Development at Team Internet AG in Munich, Markus explores new ways to take advantage of highly scalable platforms to make ad-tech, real-time bidding, and online marketing more efficient. He leverages the cloud to solve scale and performance problems, and enjoys working with cutting-edge technologies. While working on his degree in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich, Markus ran a large German movie review site and enjoyed his first contact with AWS, all the way back in 2008. Since then, he has focused on sharing his knowledge with other companies and users.

Markus co-founded and still runs the AWS User Group in Munich (over 800 members and growing). He speaks frequently on tech and cloud topics at meetups, universities, and conferences (including AWS re:Invent) and the 2015 AWS Berlin Summit.

You can connect with Markus on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

Cliff Lu
Cliff is a senior architect with 104 Corp. His work there drives business agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. He’s been a Solutions Architect and a DevOps Evangelist at several enterprises and startups in Taiwan. He specializes in service migration, and has built tools and designed patterns that facilitate cloud adoption. Cliff has earned several AWS certifications and presented the 2015 Taiwan Recap at re:Invent 2015.

Cliff has served as the organizer of AWS User Group Taiwan since 2014. The group currently boasts over 4,500 members and has been meeting regularly since 2012.

You can read Cliff’s blog or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Welcome Aboard
Please join me in welcoming our newest AWS Community Heroes!

— Jeff;

I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes:

• Jarrod Levitan
• Keith Yau
• Boyan Dimitrov
• Austen Collins
• Teri Radichel

The Heroes share their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blogs, events, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more.

Jarrod Levitan
Jarrod is the Chief Cloud Officer of TriNimbus, an Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner and leading DevOps service provider, which supports organizations as they migrate to and take advantage of AWS and the Cloud. Being a hard core AWS enthusiast, Jarrod is also an organizer of the Canadian AWS User Group Meetups in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton. As an entrepreneur with experience building an enterprise SaaS company, Jarrod is a change agent supporting organizations as they shift culture and strategically adopt progressive technologies. Serving customers and making them successful long term is at his core and when combined with his extensive financial and technological background he provides immeasurable strategic insight.

You can connect with Jarrod on LinkedIn and follow him Twitter.

Keith Yau
Keith is the founder of BootDev, a cloud based platform for running websites. BootDev is built on AWS and leverages AWS services such as S3, Route 53, CloudFormation, and CloudFront, allowing it to power fault-tolerant, large scale web applications.

Keith has worked on large scale web projects for several enterprise customers across Japan, China, and US in the gaming, Internet, and big data industries. For a large Southeast Asia news site, he engineered a way to deploy a multi-level caching architecture with auto-scaling. Keith is active in the startup and technology community across China, organizing groups like Drupal China and Barcamp China. He is also an active member of  several AWS User Group Meetups in China.  He shares his AWS and cloud related knowledge & experience on his personal tech blog and the “bootdev” channel on Wechat.

Connect with Keith on LinkedIn, or use the following QRcode to join the Wechat channel:

Boyan Dimitrov
Boyan is Director of Platform Engineering at Sixt, where he is working on a next generation mobility ecosystem. He is a passionate cloud architect with plenty of experience in distributed systems, self-healing applications and microservices platforms. Before joining Sixt, Boyan was very active in the startup scene, most recently he was the Platform Automation Lead at Hailo where he worked on Hailo 2.0 – a global microservices platform.

Boyan has been using AWS since 2008!  In past years he has helped several small and large businesses experience and benefit from running their workloads on the cloud. He is a frequent speaker at AWS meetups and Summits, sharing design patterns for developing and operating highly scalable cloud-native solutions. A devoted enthusiast of the Go programming language, Boyan worked on goamz, one of the first AWS SDKs for Go.

Connect with Boyan on LinkedIn, folllow him on Twitter, watch his SlideShare presentations, or take a peek at his GitHub repos!

Austen Collins
Austen is an entrepreneur and software engineer located in Oakland, CA.  His specific focus is on building cheap, scalable Node.js applications while minimizing DevOps requirements as much as possible.  An enthusiastic AWS Lambda user from day one, Austen founded the Serverless Framework (formerly JAWS), an open source project and module ecosystem to help everyone build applications exclusively on Lambda, without the hassle and costs required by servers.  AWS Lambda can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of all software projects.  Every ambitious developer and company should take advantage of Lambda, and Austen will help you get started.

You can connect with Austen on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter and check out his code on GitHub.

Teri Radichel
Teri is a security and software professional with a strong interest in the automation of security, processes and data analysis, with a focus on auditing, networking and financial systems. As a master software engineer on the cloud team for a large financial institution, she helped engineer the initial use of the AWS platform and implements networking for over 60 VPCs.  Teri started the Seattle AWS Architects Engineers Meet Up to connect with and learn from other AWS users. She runs a side consulting business which is part of the AWS Partner Network.  She has earned multiple security certifications from SANS Institute, and also holds an AWS Certification, a Master of Software Engineering from Seattle University, and a Business degree from the University of Washington.

You can connect with Teri on LinkedIn and follow her on Twitter, and read her blog, Random Internet Connections.

Welcome Aboard!
Please join me in welcoming our newest AWS Community Heroes!

— Jeff;

I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes:

• Adam Smolnik
• Kai Hendry
• Onur Salk
• Paolo Latella
• Raphael Francis
• Rob Linton

The Heroes share their enthusiasm for AWS  via social media, blogs, events, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more.

Adam Smolnik
Adam is a Principal Software Engineer at Pitney Bowes, a global technology company offering products and solutions that enable commerce in the areas of customer information management, location intelligence, customer engagement, shipping and mailing, and global ecommerce. Prior to Pitney Bowes, Adam worked as an application developer, consultant, and designer for companies like Kroll Ontrack, IBM and EDS. He supports and publishes articles on Chmurowisko.pl, the most recognized Polish website revolving around Cloud technology and premier source of information about Amazon AWS and Cloud Computing in general.

Adam is also a co-founder of AWS User Group Poland (established in 2014), an active speaker and trainer at Cloud conferences, instructor at Cloud and Software workshops as well as co-organizer of the Cloudyna conference. Be sure to take a look at his LinkedIn profile.

Kai Hendry
Kai Hendry is the founder of Webconverger, a company and open source project of the same name, supplier of Web kiosk and signage software since 2007. After graduating from the University of Helsinki with a Master’s degree in Computer Science in 2005, he travelled and worked around the world to discover insecure Web kiosks in Internet cafes and public spaces. On return to England, he engineered a secure Web kiosk operating system based on Debian and maintained it on weekends whilst in fulltime employment working upon Web technologies.

Over time, Webconverger’s popularity grew and by the end of his tenure in the telecommunication’s industry he decided move to Singapore, get married and focus on his company. Now a successful small business, Webconverger provides reliable management service for Web kiosks using AWS services such as S3 with Route 53 fail over.

Kai is an active member of the maker community in Singapore, usually found working from Hackerspace.SG, helps with the local AWS User Group Singapore Meetup group and organizes the Singapore Hack and Tell chapter.

You can find Kai on Twitter and at his home page.

Onur Salk
For 8 years Onur Salk has been leading the infrastructure and technical operations of Yemeksepeti.com, which has since been acquired by Delivery Hero. He is also responsible for Foodonclick.com, Ifood.jo, Yemek.com and Irmik.com.

He helped build Yemek.com, a fully automated and self-healing website, which runs entirely on Amazon Web Services. In a first for Turkey, he worked to migrate Foodonclick.com to AWS, achieving implementing of MS SQL Always On running in a production environment.

Onur regularly publishes AWS articles on his blog Wekanban.com and is the founder and organizer of the AWS User Group Turkey Meetup group in Istanbul. He is passionate about cloud computing, automation, configuration management and DevOps. He also enjoys programming in Python and developing open source AWS tools.

You can find Onur on Twitter, read his blog, and view his LinkedIn profile.

Paolo Latella
Paolo Latella is a Cloud Solutions Architect and AWS Technical Trainer at XPeppers, an enterprise focused on Cloud technologies and DevOps methodologies and member of the AWS Partner Network (APN). Paolo has more than 15 years of experience in IT and has worked on AWS technologies since 2008. Before joining XPeppers he was a Solution Architect Team Leader at Interact, an enterprise leader in Digital Media for the Cloud. There he followed the first Hybrid Cloud project for the Italian Public Sector.

He graduated from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in Computer Science, publishing a thesis about “Auto configuration and monitoring of Wireless Sensors Network”. After graduating, he received a research grant for the study of advanced network systems and mission critical services at the CASPUR (Consorzio Applicazioni Supercalcolo per Università e Ricerca) now CINECA.

Paolo hosts regular meetings as the Co-Founder of AWS User Group Italia and AWS User Group Ticino. He can also be found participating at various technology conferences in Italy.

You can follow Paolo on Twitter, read his LinkedIn profile, or inspect his GitHub repos.

Raphael Francis
Raphael Francis is a proud Cebuano technopreneur. He is the Chief Technology Officer of Upteam Corporation, a worldwide supplier of authentic, curated and pre-owned high-end brands. He serves as a consultant to the management services company Penbrothers, business SaaS company Yewusoftware and was a founding member of AVA.ph, the Philippine’s first curated marketplace for premium brands. He also served as the CTO of Techforge Solutions, an IT firm that launched various brands, enterprises and online ventures.

“Sir Rafi” has genuine enthusiasm for effective mentoring. He comes from a family of teachers and educators, and was a professor himself at the Sacred Heart – Ateneo de Cebu and La Salle College of St. Benilde.

As co-leader of the AWS User Group Philippines since 2013, he regularly answers questions, gives advice and organizes events for the AWS community. Read Raphael’s LinkedIn profile to learn more.

Rob Linton
Rob Linton is the founder of Podzy, an encrypted on premise replacement for Dropbox, which was the winner of the 2013 Australian iAwards Toolsets category. Over the past 20 years as a data specialist he’s worked as a spatial information systems professional and data professional. His first company, Logicaltech Systalk has received numerous awards and commendations for product excellence, and was the winner of the Australian 2010 iAwards.

In July 2011 he founded the first AWS User Group in Australia. He is a certified Security Systems ISO 27001 auditor, and one of the few people to receive a perfect score for his SQL Server certification. His last book was Amazon Web Services: Migrate your .NET Enterprise Application to the Amazon Cloud.

In his spare time he enjoys coding in C++ on his Macbook Pro and chasing his kids away from things that break relatively easily.

Welcome Aboard
Please join me in welcoming our newest heroes!

— Jeff;

I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes:

• Genki Sugawara (Cookpad)
• Minyoung Jeong (The Beatpacking Company)
• Brandon Burton (AWS Advent)

The Heroes share their enthusiasm for AWS  via social media, blogs, events, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more.

Genki Sugawara
Genki is an Operations Engineer at Cookpad, the largest recipe sharing service in Japan.

At Cookpad, he’s developed many tools for managing AWS services to support operations. Currently, he manages more than 800 EC2 servers. Cookpad migrated to AWS in 2011, and is built in Ruby on Rails. To learn more about how Genki and Cookpad utilize AWS, take a look at his slides. You can follow Genki on Twitter, check out his GitHub and his Bitbucket, or read his blog.

Minyoung Jeong
Minyoung is a key engineer at The Beatpacking Company, producer of the Beat mobile music app. Beta uses Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to implement a free streaming service that grew to over one million subscribers in just seven months.

A well-known speaker in his native Korea, Minyoung created the AWS Korea User Group on Facebook in 2012 and has grown it to over 4,300 members via community-based Q&A and discussions. Minyoung likes programming on Python, Ruby, Scala, DevOps on cloud and is interested in small open source projects for AWS management. You can see his presentations and learn more about the user group.

Brandon Burton
Brandon is a passionate and experienced Systems Administration and Operations Engineering practitioner. He focuses on web operations, automation, scalability, configuration management, and cloud computing.

He has worked on production environments that range from a single server, to websites that meet the needs of 500 million or more users. As an AWS user since 2009, he knows the ins and outs of the cloud, the data center, and everything in between. Brandon is active in the Los Angeles and global DevOps communities. He has organized the LA DevOps, numerous DevOpsDays events, the ongoing weekly HangOps sessions, and the yearly AWS Advent blogging series.

You can find Brandon on Twitter and on his web site. Be sure to check out his GitHub!

Welcome Aboard
Please join me in welcoming our newest heroes!

— Jeff;

Earlier this year we welcomed the first AWS Community Heroes. As I wrote at the time, these hard-working folks were selected for the program because they routinely deliver high-quality, impactful, developer-focused activities to the AWS Community.

More Heroes
Today I would like to welcome eight new heroes!

Java developer Satoshi Yokota is the Founder & CEO of Classmethod, a writer for Developers.IO, and a founding member of JAWS-UG. In 2010 he participated in the kickoff meeting of JAWS-UG and has help to expand it to more than 40 branches. JAWS-UG currently features more than 100 leaders, over 100 meetup events, over 1000 members.

Brazilian developer Heitor Vital has been working with mobile games/applications and web development for over 10 years. He blogs on developer-oriented AWS topics and recently earned an Executive MBA. As CTO of Site Blindado SA, his work focuses on security, cloud computing, and infrastructure.

Based in Berlin, Chad Fowler is CTO of Wunderlist. As a leading voice on the topic of cloud-based deployment techniques, Chad coined the term “immutable infrastructure.” Chad has been host and organizer of many technology conferences including the International Ruby Conference & Railsconf.

Norm Driskell is a public sector digital leader. He focuses on digital transformation, transparency, and open source. From his base in London, Norm founded the AWS UK User Group in 2012, with events every two months and sponsorship from leading tech and media companies.

Victor Oliveira is a founding partner of Concrete Solutions. As Director of Engineering for this Brazilian company, he runs Cloud Computing and Agile practices. Concrete Solutions was the first AWS Partner in Latin America, due in large part to Victor’s efforts. Today he helps clients turn infrastructure in to code while also keeping a watchful eye out for optimizations that can reduce costs without sacrificing quality.

After leading technical operations at Pinterest, Ryan Park became Principal Engineer for Runscope. There, he leads the design and development effort for their AWS-powered debugging and testing service. Ryan speaks on the topic of application design and is a mentor for companies in the 500 Startups incubator.

As a founding member of the engineering team at Bizo (recently acquired by LinkedIn), Larry Ogrodnek began using AWS way back in 2008! He adopted additional AWS services as they came along, and enjoys shutting down homegrown alternatives in the process. Larry is the co-founder and organizer of the Advanced AWS Meetup Group in San Francisco.

Lynn Langit consults on big data and cloud architecture from her base in Southern California. She has designed production-quality AWS solutions and also delivers technical content (also related to AWS) at developer conferences all over the world. Lynn creates technical AWS screencasts and is the primary courseware author for Teaching Kids Programming.

Welcome!
Please join me in welcoming these new AWS Community Heroes to the roster!

— Jeff;

I love the community that has formed around AWS! Many of our customers have decided, with no help or encouragement from us, to actively and independently promote our services, solutions, blog posts, success stories, and best practices to their peers online. They do this by blogging, tweeting, creating videos, writing and sharing sample code, authoring books and tutorials, setting up and running AWS user groups, and so forth.

AWS Community Heroes
In order to recognize and publicly acknowledge the efforts of these hard-working folks, we have launched the AWS Community Hero program. An AWS Community Hero has routinely delivered high-quality, impactful, developer-focused activities to the AWS Community.

Welcome
Our first group of Community Heroes are based in the United States. We plan to add additional heroes from the US and other parts of the world before too long. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce the first group!

Valentino Volonghi currently designs and implements the globally distributed architecture behind AdRoll. He is the President and Founder of the Italian Python Association that runs PyCon Italy. Since 2000, Valentino has specialized in distributed systems and actively worked with several Open Source projects. In his free time, he shows off his biking skills on his Cervelo S2 on 50+ mile rides around the Bay.

Peter Sankauskas is the CEO of CloudNative, Founder of Answers for AWS, a NetflixOSS Cloud Prize winner, and organizer of the Advanced AWS Meetup in San Francisco. His passion for scalability, reliability and simplicity has helped countless people get the most of out of the cloud, and it has only just begun.

Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. Hes always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. At Battery Ventures, he advises the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence. Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflixs migration to a large scale, highly available AWS based architecture and has presented it at many conferences including packed room sessions at AWS Re:Invent 2012 and 2013. By open sourcing over 40 projects, the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform has helped many other applications use AWS more effectively. Adrian presented prizes for the best ten contributions to NetflixOSS during Werners 2013 Re:Invent keynote. Adrian graduated from The City University, London with a Bsc in Applied Physics and Electronics, and was named one of the top leaders in Cloud Computing in 2011 and 2012 by SearchCloudComputing magazine. He can usually be found on Twitter @adrianco.

Eric Hammond has been an active user and supporter of AWS since 2007. An early pioneer in creating community AMIs for Ubuntu, Eric introduced the concept of user-data scripts for EC2 instance initialization. Eric publishes articles on Alestic.com, his tech blog about practical uses of AWS, and is active in answering AWS questions on StackOverflow and ServerFault. Eric has built and led successful technology for a number of early stage Internet startups in the Los Angeles area including Citysearch.com, Stamps.com, Rent.com, and his current company, CampusExplorer.com, which runs entirely on AWS.

Ben Whaley is a consultant in the Bay area focused on cloud systems, automation, and systems architecture. Ben ran the network and systems for Apigee, a globally-distributed API management platform built on Amazon Web Services. He built and operated the AWS-hosted back end services for Anki, a robotics and artificial intelligence company. He is the co-author of the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (the de facto standard text on Linux administration), and is the author of two educational videos: Linux Web Operations and Linux System Administration. Ben is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). In his spare time he rides snowboards and mountain bikes, cooks, and shaves yaks.

Jeremy Edberg (aka Jedberg) is an angel investor and advisor for various incubators and startups and was the founding member of the reliability group at Netflix, the largest video streaming service in the world, hosted entirely on AWS. Previously he managed operations for Reddit where he was responsible for reddit’s Amazon EC2-based platform that handled over 17 million unique visitors a month and over a billion page views (at the time). Jeremy has also worked as a Systems Administrator, Programmer, and Security Engineer for eBay, PayPal, Sendmail and UC Berkeley. Jeremy also tech-edited the highly acclaimed AWS for Dummies. He holds a Cognitive Science degree from UC Berkeley.

Congratulations!
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recorded a personal greeting for the first AWS Community Heroes:

— Jeff;