The golden jacket & being an AWS Ambassador

What is it about

Be curious and never stop learning.

In June 2023, I got the AWS Ambassador Badge issued from AWS, as being part of the program for almost a year now. I wrote a longer blog post about the Global Ambassador meetup last year in this blog post.

My biggest takeaways were
AWS Ambassadors are a community from all over the world with highly skilled (5.4 AWS certifications on average), humble folks with strong opinions.
Working/exchanging on challenging topics that almost every partner faces and being able to ask how they got solved, and not having to reinvent the wheel.
This event was essential to create personal connections with AWS folks and other engineers who have a similar role in other partner companies. Now I am part of a worldwide technical expert circle outside the border of the kreuzwerker organization.

How will I continue

Officially I lost the ambassador status, as I left the partner organization by the end of June 2023. However continue here on my own blog, writing about AWS, tools, DevOps, and solution architectures.

On the way to becoming an AWS Ambassador, I completed the challenge of becoming fully certified in 2022. If you want to know the details and my study techniques, feel free to take a look at the blog post I wrote in November 2022.

Furthermore, to maintain the status the bar for 2023 was to hold at least 2 professional or specialty certifications and to do at least 8 community and 2 business contributions in a rolling 12 months window. However, you should contribute every quarter to have a steady pace.

To give you an example of the possibilities of contributions, in parenthesis behind was my total count from 2021 to the end of June 2023 and I added the benefit of each from my point of view.

The following items are an excerpt of my community contributions

Blog Post (12): it helped me condense down my technical thoughts a explain to the audience the challenge and solution we built and the why. Also because I got inspired again by the blog from Emir Ribic: Why you should start blogging and his being above average post.
Open Source Project (6): You do not have to be shy, as I wrote in a previous post. As said I am an engineer by heart and love giving back to the community. Furthermore, I like to use those projects to improve my technical skills and learn something new.
Podcast (1), Webinar/Video (3): This was actually super fun.
Presentation (4): In general I love sharing my knowledge and delivering energetic presentations about, not only technical topics. Later this year I will attend the Train the trainer to bring my event hosting and presentation skills to the next level, which started back in 2019 with the Freisprecher-Bootcamp.

and business contributions for my previous employer kreuzwerker (see partner page) in which I had major contributions:

APN Competencies: Migration Consulting (July 2022), Data & Analytics Consulting (November 2022) & APN Immersion Days - Program: (early 2022): this taught me how to prepare and deliver in audit with external personas.
AWS Service Delivery (3): those are the small siblings of the competencies
AWS Well-Architected Partner (20+): As I owned this program, I was responsible for the delivery, fulfilling the yearly KPIs, and also upskilling other peers within the organization. Furthermore, it trained me the see workloads on AWS from a holistic view.
AWS Cert Influence - Associate (15), Professional (4), Specialty (13): I loved being a role model for my colleagues and leading by example by achieving 12 AWS certifications. In total, I inspired 32! others to follow my path and helped them prepare by e.g. sharing my study techniques.

My path in the AWS universe will continue. Let’s what’s up to learn next!