Announcing AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations knowledge badge on AWS Skill Builder

If you’re an advertising technology executive, engineer, or cloud architect, you now have a clear path to build expertise in AI-powered video advertising on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations knowledge badge readiness path, available at no cost on AWS Skill Builder, gives you structured training across the full programmatic advertising stack, from foundational concepts through production-grade architectures. Whether you’re protecting ad revenue streams, evaluating cloud-focused infrastructure, or building real-time bidding (RTB) systems, this curriculum helps you gain the AWS knowledge your role requires. Complete the learning path and earn a digital badge to validate your expertise.

Why did we build this curriculum?

The advertising technology industry is changing rapidly. Cookie deprecation, first-party data strategies, and AI-driven decisioning are reshaping how publishers monetize content and how advertisers reach audiences.

Three distinct groups are feeling this pressure most acutely: advertising technology (AdTech) executives, advertising and media professionals, and cloud architects and engineers.

AdTech executives need a clear understanding of the AI-powered programmatic architectures for things like RTB optimization, agentic ad decisioning, and (server side ad insertion (SSAI) monetization across streaming, and free, ad-supported television (FAST) channels, which can directly drive their video advertising revenue growth while minimizing costly disruptions to ad revenue streams.

Experienced advertising and media professionals, who are adept at campaign management, yield optimization, and programmatic workflows, are being asked to protect brands, maximize revenue, minimize waste, and evaluate, architect, or oversee cloud-focused infrastructure without a clear path to the specific AWS knowledge their role requires. They shouldn’t have to piece it together across dozens of disconnected services.

Cloud architects and engineers who have expertise in AWS offerings and are moving into the AdTech space face a mirror challenge: they have deep AWS fluency but lack advertising industry context, vocabulary, and knowledge of latency-sensitive and spiky high intake volume architecture patterns, which is known to make AdTech uniquely demanding.

Today, we’re excited to announce the AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations knowledge badge readiness path, now available on AWS Skill Builder. This structured learning path solves these challenges in a single, structured curriculum designed specifically for this intersection. This path features comprehensive training courses and a digital badge, available through Credly, to validate your expertise.

This validated credential equips leaders to make confident infrastructure investment decisions that protect yield, reduce ad insertion failures, and capitalize on the multibillion dollar shift to streaming video monetization through resilient, production-grade AWS architectures. This curated knowledge path covers a range of topics to accelerate your upskilling journey, including advertising technology foundations, core AWS services and tools for advertising solutions, reference architectures and best practices, partner technologies and integrations, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)–powered monetization and operations strategies.

The AWS for Advertising & Marketing Team notes that the advertising technology ecosystem demands expertise at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and programmatic workflows. With this learning path, we want every advertising executive and technologist—regardless of their starting point—to have a clear, AWS authored route to building that expertise.

Whether you’re an AdTech executive, product leader, engineer, or operations professional, this curriculum is designed to help you build AI-powered video advertising solutions on AWS, whether you’re building foundational concepts or advanced architectures.

What’s in the learning path?

The learning path is organized into five progressive learning tiers, totaling 40 courses built around real advertising workflows, reference architectures, and hands-on AWS service deep dives. All content is offered at no cost on AWS Skill Builder.

Tier 1 – AdTech Foundations

For professionals new to digital advertising technology or those seeking a shared vocabulary across teams. This tier covers:

• Advertising 101 – Learn the advertising funnel, stakeholders and their business roles, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) applicable for them.
• Publisher monetization trends – Learn about the ad insertion frameworks client-side ad insertion (CSAI), server-side ad insertion (SSAI), server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), contextual advertising, FAST channels, and linear-digital convergence for creating unified workflows that optimize ad delivery, inventory management, and revenue generation.
• Publisher ad server – Explore architecture, ad decisioning, inventory management, and reporting.
• Supply-side platform (SSP) – Learn about auction management, demand aggregation, yield optimization, and header bidding integration.
• Demand-side platform (DSP) – Learn about the features, metrics, KPIs, and comparison with SSPs and ad exchanges.
• Ad networks and ad exchanges – Understand private marketplaces, the programmatic ecosystem, and how RTB-based exchanges work.
• Advertisers and agencies – Understand their roles, key market players, and the KPIs that drive advertiser and agency decisions.
• Data management platform (DMP) and customer data platform (CDP) – Understand their needs, the functions they provide, the key market players, and the type of data they store (first-, second-, or third-party)
• Auxiliary players and independent software vendors (ISVs) – Understand the industry standards framework in play governed by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) frameworks and the industry leading ISVs handling ads measurement, ad fraud verification, ad quality, and brand safety functions.

Tier 2 – Core AWS Services for AdTech

After you understand the advertising ecosystem, Tier 2 shows you which AWS services power each part of the workflow. These aren’t generic cloud tutorials—each course maps directly to real advertising challenges like low-latency bidding or privacy-safe data collaboration. You’ll learn what each service does and when and why to use it in production advertising systems. This tier covers hands-on service deep dives mapped directly to advertising workflows:

• AWS Elemental MediaTailor – Learn about the differences between CSAI, SSAI, and SGAI ad insertion; manifest manipulation; live, video on demand (VOD), and FAST use cases; and the end-to-end ad insertion workflow.
• AWS Clean Rooms – Learn secure data collaboration, privacy-enhancing analytics, and measurement use cases across advertisers and publishers.
• AWS Entity Resolution – Explore matching techniques, workflow configuration, and integration with the broader CDP stack that publishers can use to match related records.
• AWS RTB Fabric – Learn about the customer challenges this service solves, core architecture setup between advertising technology companies and their partners, and gateway, link, and module components setup and observability setup with key Amazon CloudWatch metrics to track.
• AWS databases for advertising – Learn about Amazon Memory DB and Amazon DynamoDB for low-latency RTB workloads, with a decision guide for choosing between them and operational best practices.
• Compute for low-latency advertising – Explore the use of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) with Karpenter for low-latency compute, Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for cost optimization, Amazon EKS with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) for burst scaling, and AWS NAT Gateway for high-volume outbound traffic
• AWS Network Load Balancer for bid intake – Configure best practices like NLB IP-mode targets, Pod readiness gates, load balancer Capacity Unit (LCU) reservation, and zonal architecture for microsecond bid request routing.
• Generative AI services for advertising – Explore Amazon Bedrock Data Automation, media models on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for advertising agents, and a decision framework for choosing between AWS managed or customer managed generative AI.
• AWS Elemental Inference – Learn about the generally available features of this service, such as smart subtitles, smart cropping, and automated clip and highlight generation, and how they open new monetization paths, turning a single live stream into social-ready and highlight clips you can run as additional ad-supported inventory while keeping content accessible for ad-supported distribution.

Tier 3 – Reference Architectures

Tier 3 gives production-grade architecture patterns to design and build these advertising workloads:

• Architecture design principles – Learn the core AWS design principles for advertising workloads and learn about latency, throughput, and privacy-enhanced collaboration patterns.
• Ad insertion architecture covering – Build live streaming, VOD, and FAST channel assembly reference architectures.
• Publisher ad server architecture – Learn the core components and design principles of a publisher ad server architecture, explain best practices across all six Well-Architected Framework pillars as applied to ad serving workloads, and map AWS services to each stage of the publisher ad server pipeline.
• RTB architecture – Explore the programmatic bidding workflow, design principles, and deep dives on RTB on Amazon EKS (DSP), AdTech Private Network on AWS (connecting SSP and DSP through AWS PrivateLink), and AWS RTB Fabric as a purpose-built network.
• Data pipeline architecture – Learn the advertising data pipeline, reference solution architectures, and best practices for ingestion through reporting.
• Multi-Region architecture – Learn the architectural best practices and implementation guidelines for AWS multi-Region deployments for advertising workloads along the five key considerations of availability, disaster recovery and resilience, latency, data residency, and global deployment.
• Privacy enhanced collaboration – Build privacy-enhanced collaboration with AWS Clean Rooms, trusted execution environments (TEEs), and well-architected best practices for campaign planning and measurement use cases.
• CDP architecture – Explore the logical layers of a CDP, data ingestion patterns (such as batch, near real-time, and real time), identity resolution, segmentation, and activation.
• Agentic for advertising generative AI use cases – Learn about creative ad generation, contextual advertising, advertising agents for media planning, ad-break detection with Amazon Bedrock Data Automation, and agentic intelligent ad operations.

Tier 4 – Key Partner Technologies on AWS

In addition to the AWS services, there are key partner technologies widely deployed in advertising infrastructure. Tier 4 will do a deep dive into implementing these:

• Aerospike on AWS – Learn how Aerospike solves advertising data challenges and learn the recommended implementation architecture on AWS, the operational best practices across all six AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars, and benchmarking guidance.
• Implementation for PrivateLink for SSP-to-DSP connectivity – Configure operational best practices for architecture, latency optimization, availability and resilience, security and access control, and observability setup.

Tier 5 – Operations, Tools & Resources

Tier 5 gives a deep dive into operational runbooks, AWS tools, and resources for teams running advertising workloads in production:

• Operational runbooks and best practices – Operationalize runbooks covering monetization strategy implementation across media platforms, incident response, and platform management. These cover the following operational scenarios:
• AWS Elemental MediaTailor ad insertion and FAST channel assembly operations – Configure recommendations for Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms, scaling and resilience best practices, pre-warming, and guidance on AWS service limits.
• Learn the operational best practices across all six AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars for operating AWS RTB Fabric in production.
• Ingesting and processing high-volume RTB requests – Configure performance scaling, health monitoring, fault tolerance, and cost optimization.
• Amazon Aurora Global Database – Build multi-Region database architecture for advertising DB, replication mechanisms, disaster recovery, and failover strategies for global advertising operations.
• Amazon EKS compute for low-latency scale – Configure best practices on Pod startup optimization using features such as Bottlerocket AMIs, Seekable OCI (SOCI) for lazy loading container images, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) caching, readiness probes, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler with advertising-specific scaling needs, and pipeline monitoring.
• AWS Unified Operations – Learn about the team structure, support catalog entitlements, and how to engage AWS for advertising workloads.
• Overview of AWS advertising-specific resources – The course provides an overview of the following offerings and concepts along with guidance on how to use them:
  • AWS Video Streaming Advertising (VSA) Lens – Learn about the AWS Well-Architected Framework lens for video streaming programmatic advertising workloads.
  • AWS Streaming Media Lens – Learn about the AWS Well-Architected Framework lens for streaming media and ad insertion workloads.
  • AWS public workshops and AWS GitHub solutions – Build using the advertising-specific AWS workshops and GitHub solutions available for hands-on exploration.
  • Solutions for Advertising and Marketing – Build using the advertising-specific solution guidance and learn how to operate in production.

Who is this for?

The AWS AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations digital knowledge badge readiness path has value for a variety of learners. The following table outlines who can gain from the course, where they should start, and what they will gain by completing the learning path.

To earn your digital badge

To earn your digital badge, follow these steps:

1. Create an AWS Skill Builder account if you don’t already have one.
2. Enroll in AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations knowledge badge readiness path.
3. Complete the courses in the learning path or skip directly to the assessment if you’re already familiar with the content.
4. Pass the online assessment with a score of 80% or higher.
5. Receive your digital badge by email through Credly within 24 hours.

Conclusion

The 40-course curriculum of the AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations knowledge badge readiness path gives advertising technology professionals a structured path to build and validate expertise across the full programmatic advertising stack, from AdTech foundations through production-grade reference architectures, using AWS services and industry best practices. By completing the learning path and passing the digital assessment, you earn your AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations digital badge, validating your competency across the advertising technology workflows that matter most to your role.

The AI-Powered Video Advertising & Operations knowledge badge readiness path is available now on AWS Skill Builder at no cost. Start with Tier 1 if you’re new to advertising technology or go directly to the tier that matches your experience level. Complete the assessment to earn your digital badge and validate your expertise.

After you complete the learning path, continue your AWS advertising technology journey with these resources:

• AWS for Advertising & Marketing – Solution areas, customer stories, and partner network
• Guidance for Advertising Agency Planning Management on AWS – Agency workflow reference architecture
• Guidance for Advertising Agents on AWS – Discover how to transform advertising operations through AI-powered automation and multi-agent collaboration systems on Amazon Bedrock

We’ll update this learning path as AWS services and industry practices evolve. Have feedback? Contact us at AWS Skill Builder Support Center.