Our brand-new cohort of AWS Heroes has arrived – June 2024

The vibrant AWS community is made up of millions of builders worldwide. Within this global audience, there are technical enthusiasts who are going above and beyond to solve problems and generously share their learnings and best practices to empower others—the AWS Heroes. These inspirational leaders make significant contributions, and the AWS Heroes program is our way of recognizing and highlighting their impactful efforts.

Please join us in celebrating our newest group of AWS Heroes!

Arshad Zackeriya – Wellington, New Zealand

Community Hero Arshad Zackeriya is a Senior Engineer at Xero, specializing in empowering organizations to deliver software at high velocity. He is well-known in the community as “Zack,” and his expertise primarily centers around Amazon EKS and developer tools. Zack is also a public speaker, and serves as one of the co-organizers and leaders for the Wellington Chapter in the AWS User Group Aotearoa New Zealand. Additionally, he was an AWS New Voices Coach and was an AWS Community Builder for five consecutive years, earning recognition as a nominee for the AWS Community Builder of the Year for 2022 and 2023 in the APJ region.

Julia Furst Morgado – New York, USA

Container Hero Julia Furst Morgado is a Global Technologist on the Product Strategy team in the Office of the CTO at Veeam Software. She is committed to diversity and inclusion, and her passion lies in making Cloud Native technologies and DevOps best practices easier to understand by sharing her knowledge. Julia excels in evangelizing and creating engaging content focused on Amazon EKS, and presenting at major events about Amazon EKS Blueprints and Amazon EKS security. Additionally, she co-organizes the AWS Community Day New York, Kubernetes Community Days, and the AWS User Group Lisbon – Women in Tech chapter, fostering vibrant collaboration and learning opportunities.

Paloma Lataliza – Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Community Hero Paloma Lataliza is a Cloud Engineer with over six years of experience. She has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, specialized in Cloud Computing, is an enthusiast of container technologies and passionate about technology and sharing knowledge. Paloma is a leader of the AWS User Group Minas Gerais, and she is dedicated to mentoring women by providing a supportive network and offering them free classes to make tech more accessible. This is further demonstrated as the organizer of the AWSome Women Community Summit Brazil, and founder of the Mulheres na Nuvem Minas Gerais (Women in the Cloud Minas Gerais) project. Previously, she was an AWS Community Builder, producing technical content, speaking at Cloud and DevOps events, and mentoring those eager to deepen their technical skills.

Shaoyi Li – Shenzhen, China

Community Hero Shaoyi Li is a Lead Cloud Engineer focusing on cybersecurity and generative AI, advocating for cloud generative AI security and governance solutions to help the community build secure, compliant, and responsible generative AI applications. He is a regular speaker at AWS events, such as AWS Summits, AWS Community Days, and AWS User Group Meetups. Shaoyi also shares his insights into AWS technologies through various channels, including AWS case studies, AWS blogs, AWS WeChat channels, community.aws, and on his social networks.

Vishal Alhat – Pune, India

Community Hero Vishal Alhat is a Senior Software Engineer at Forcepoint, a leading cybersecurity company, where he leverages his 9+ years of experience to play a key role in cloud-based deployments. He focuses on cloud security and DevOps using AWS, implementing DevOps tools, AWS services, and best practices to automate deployments and ensure consistency across Forcepoint’s cloud infrastructure. Vishal is passionate about sharing his knowledge and was selected as the AWS Community Builder of the Year for the APJ region, which is a testament to his dedication. Furthermore, he is the AWS User Group Pune leader, and regularly speaks at conferences, meetups, AWS Community Days, and AWS Summits worldwide.

Learn More

Please visit the AWS Heroes website if you’d like to learn more about the AWS Heroes program or to connect with a Hero near you.

— Taylor