My personal journey into the Cloud!

The words “Cloud Computing” are used far too often these days, and you may not be familiar with this technical term and the nuances behind it, as it happened to me a year and a half ago. Over the past 18 months, I have been working for an IT company, Teracloud, and now I can safely tell you the meaning of Infrastructure as Code, Machine Learning, data migration, HIPAA Compliance Law and Privacy Rules, and many other concepts related to the Cloud Computing environment.

I’m Victoria and I specialize in Digital Marketing. The other jobs I have held were totally unrelated to the Cloud. Of course, I knew who Jeff Bezos was when I arrived at Teracloud, but I had no idea that Amazon developed cloud services. I was only aware, and very well, that Amazon was an e-commerce platform (my apologies to Jeff, DevOps, DevSecOps, and SysAdmins!!!).

This job gave me the possibility of going into the Cloud Computing world little by little.

One month after I began working, my teammates and I traveled to the AWS Community Day, which took place in Buenos Aires for the first time, in order to cover the event on social media. “AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences where event logistics and content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. They feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Community Day events deliver a peer-to-peer learning experience, providing developers with a venue for them to acquire AWS knowledge in their preferred way: from one another. In many ways, they are events put on ‘by the community, for the community”1.

We attended the keynote speech of the Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, Werner Vogels, and met important personalities of AWS Latam, such as the AWS Country Manager - Argentina at that moment, Andrea Cerqueira, AWS Heroes, and many others.

During my time in Teracloud, I learned a lot about this community. I’ve met a lot of interesting people in several events, like workshops and #AdminBirras, organized by the DoctArmy group.

The DoctArmy group organizes tech meetups at Córdoba, Argentina, in order to gather professionals in the field to share their ideas and experiences; every first Friday of the month, DoctArmy brings together members of the IT community through an informal space where IT people know each other sharing beers, #AdminBirras.

My work team and my bosses cheered me up to continue this learning journey into Cloud Computing and Amazon Web Services. Teracloud, as an AWS Select Consulting Partner, gave me the opportunity to improve my knowledge by attending AWS courses. That could sound simple enough, but it was actually quite challenging.

I made up my mind and last year, despite the nervousness and inner tension I felt during the process, I achieved “AWS Business Professional” and “AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Foundations - Business” accreditations. Yeah!!! To complete these digital courses I had to attend several video lessons and took exams; both of them helped me to understand the fundamentals of AWS, showing me their tools and teaching me how the business is designed.

The “AWS Business Professional” accreditation course provided me with a basic understanding of key Amazon Web Services products and services, the AWS Partner Network (APN), and core AWS business values for partners.

Besides, the “AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Foundations - Business” accreditation course allowed me to learn about techniques and best practices for AWS solutions that solve customer challenges.

Every day, I learn and get surprised with new things and concepts of this fascinating world of delivery of computing services. Cloud Computing covers the fields of servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and Artificial Intelligence over the Internet (that’s the Cloud!). With the services it offers, a business could be able to scale and run its infrastructure more efficiently.