Experts Exclusive Interview on the AWS Certified Global Community

Back in early September, I received a private message from one of the Admins of the AWS Certified Global Community as there team had noticed myself being a champion within the community’s discussions and they wanted to highlight my contributions. They have an ongoing series called Expert’s Exclusive, where they publish an exclusive interview with one of there own experts and they wanted to feature me in the series.

It was quite a nice surprise and was the second time in my career where I’d been interviewed for a publication with the previous interview having been many years ago by Linux Academy who interviewed me regarding my AWS certification journey.

Below is a copy of the interview or alternatively you can find it here.

Where are you from and what is your current role?

I am from Berkshire in the United Kingdom. I work in London as a Principal Consultant at GlobalLogic, an AWS APN Partner, providing consultancy into large enterprises.

What inspires you the most about your role?

Every day is different, which keeps the role fresh. Here are some types of things I do on a day-to-day basis:

• Conducting a well-architected review of a client’s environment.
• Performing Migration Readiness Assessments (MRA) and planning an upcoming migration to AWS.
• Setting up and customising Landing Zones.
• Working on a longer term engagement with a client in a technical capacity relating to AWS (i.e. it could be anything).

How do you “upskill” or stay up-to-date with industry trends?

Having worked in the IT Industry since 1998, one thing that has been inevitable is that technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace. I’ve always taken a proactive approach to learning modern technologies—I believe you must continuously keep learning or you become stale and you’re no longer relevant within the industry.

One of those learning curves was the adoption of Cloud Technologies. Fast forward around 10 years, and I started getting experience with a few different hypervisors such as Virtual Server, Hyper-V and VMware. The majority of my working career has been in the Managed Services arena, and a key component of that is helping clients deliver their strategic outcomes with technology being an enabler.

I’d read a lot about AWS but had never really learnt about it, nor had I even used the platform, since the company where I was working previously hadn’t started adopting Public Cloud Services. However, I noticed that the pace of innovation on the AWS platform was gaining significant momentum year on year, and thought about how my current role was going to evolve over the next few years. Thus, I took the decision to start focusing on AWS back in 2016.

Can you share a little bit about your journey with AWS?

As mentioned, I started working with AWS back in 2016 by following some online courses as well as getting my hands dirty in the console. As part of that learning and validation, I started out with the formal certifications while also working on client engagements, which helped build on that theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience.

I had achieved all of the Active AWS Certifications until AWS released the new SAP on AWS specialty back in April. However, I’m currently studying towards that. I was also recently made an AWS Community Builder in August with a focus on Security & Identity.

What part of your career or role have you found most challenging?

For me personally, I think there have been two challenging parts:

• Firstly was when I switched from working in Operations into Pre-Sales as it’s a completely different mindset whereby you go to be completely hands-off a keyboard.
• Secondly, in Pre-Sales you have to be able to convey your message in a different manner depending on the personas that you’re speaking to, e.g. C-Level, Director Level, or the Techies. Fundamentally, low-level details aren’t important to the senior execs—it’s about how it achieves their business outcome.