Among the most relevant public cloud platforms, AWS currently leads the market, being the most adopted platform by companies making the leap to the cloud. From large enterprises to startups, they are using the AWS public cloud to grow faster, reduce costs and increase agility and innovation capacity.
But to take advantage of these technologies, you also need the right, highly skilled professionals with real hands-on experience. The market is full of opportunities and there is a shortage of professionals who meet all these ideals. To highlight the work and professionalism of AWS specialists, the company has launched the APN AWS Ambassador program, which features a global community of specialists. With it, the cloud provider seeks to identify those professionals who stand out in its ecosystem. At the moment, just over 200 people in the world are on this list, just 40 are located in EMEA and only 2 are in Spain. We spoke with one of them, Manuel de Paz, to learn more about the AWS ecosystem.
Manuel de Paz, Cloud Architect at Keepler, is one of the AWS specialists recognized by the program.
Manuel de Paz is Cloud Architect at Keepler Data Tech, a company specializing in building and developing advanced data and analytics products in the public cloud, and has been working in these environments for large companies for more than 10 years.
Tell us a little bit about what the APN AWS Ambassador program is and what benefits it has for ambassadors?
It is a community of professionals recognized by AWS as a reward for their performance in promoting the use of the cloud in a constant way over time. The program encourages the dissemination of content and best practices in the use of AWS services by employees of companies that are part of the APN program. The ambassadors have access to exclusive training and resources, the possibility of publishing on the APN blog, appearing on the program’s website, etc. In general, these benefits are grouped in visibility, recognition and access to material and exclusive networking.
What’s in it for you and even your company to be in contact with other AWS ambassador profiles?
Participating in an AWS expert forum keeps you up to date on new developments, patterns, changes, and solutions to common problems, as well as providing a different view of the state of the art of AWS customer and user demands. An ecosystem as large and rich as AWS is constantly changing throughout the year, so having additional channels to keep you up to date is vital to provide the best service and reduce efforts in project execution and product deployment.
You are a public cloud specialist, specifically in AWS, what would you say to someone interested in growing professionally in their public cloud experience?
I would tell them to take advantage of the resources provided by AWS to train theirselves. There are several free and accessible programs for many groups (professionals, unemployed, students …) this will allow them to detect areas of interest and go deeper. Secondly, I would tell them to visit a virtual or in-person event (such as AWSome Day or local Summit) to learn about the state of the art as well as real projects, and finally, start on the path of certifications to reaffirm this knowledge.
And what would you tell a company about public cloud as a business solution?
Well, here we can say that I am not particularly unbiased, luckily I have been working only on cloud-native projects for several years, so I will always have a bias towards the cloud.
I would say, if you have the capacity, try it yourself, through a clear objective with a time horizon. For example, migrate the development application server to the cloud in 6 months and evaluate costs, this will allow you to familiarize yourself with all the necessary processes and integrate them internally. On the other hand, consider contacting AWS and its team of professional services partners, specifically one specialized in your industry, this will allow you to undertake larger projects or get advice based on experience.
On the other hand, I would spend some time explaining the benefits of pay-per-use and complementary monitoring measures. In general, most companies are clear about the benefits of the public cloud, however they may have concerns in these areas or others that are more particular to their industry.
How have you seen the evolution of the public cloud in recent years and how do you see the near future?
I would highlight the effort to offer solutions in line with market needs. From hybrid cloud solutions with local infrastructure, to global connectivity solutions, to satellite management solutions or even 5G proprietary networks, cloud providers are tirelessly searching for spaces in which to offer valuable services to companies of all types and nature. Technology breakthroughs have also been duly picked up, such as IoT, Machine Learning, Blockchain or quantum programming.
So I have no doubt that top-tier clouders will continue their efforts to offer cutting-edge, quality services that are aligned with the digital needs of the people and companies of the future.
On the other hand, I am glad that they are betting on much less “shiny” but equally important issues such as sustainability and carbon footprint reduction, social impact and integration, and of course education and training at all levels.
Which AWS services would you highlight for the field of advanced data analytics? Which ones do you find most interesting and which ones indispensable?
I like that through a multitude of services the entire data lifecycle is covered, to name a few: capture and ingest (AWS Kinesis, AWS IoT Core…), manipulation and curation (AWS Glue, Amazon ElasticMapReduce…), lineage and catalog (AWS Glue Data Catalog…) and, finally, storage (AWS S3, AWS DynamoDB, AWS RedShift…), for subsequent analysis (AWS Athena, AWS QuickSight and AWS Sagemaker…), thus achieving value from the treated asset.
These services have a high degree of compliance and security, but also ease of use and high integration with the rest of the AWS ecosystem.
Particularly there are some other services based on open source solutions such as AWS MSK and AWS MWAA that seem to me to be a very interesting bet. On the other hand, I think the main player is undoubtedly S3, always accompanied by at least one analytics tool: AWS Athena and/or AWS Sagemaker, this is because being a cost efficient, highly customizable and virtually unlimited solution it has been carefully designed to act as the epicenter of the data in the AWS cloud.
Terms like LowCode, hyper-automation, DataMesh, no-coding ML, democratization… and even Metaverse! In which direction is technology taking us?
Trying to imagine the future is always a fun exercise for me, part analysis and part creativity. I think the words that best define the near-term future are: convergence, trust and virtualization.
Technologies such as 5G and IoT provide access to global, constant and consistent internet, providing field information to feed artificial intelligence algorithms that are able to generate increasingly intelligent and increasingly automatic processes, so that individuals can focus on performing the creative capabilities that characterize them, delegating all kinds of predictable and repetitive work to software, thus, the performance of daily tasks will require low code tools to generate processes versus executing them.
This situation generates a new scenario where individuals require the means to technify trust, thus managing to virtualize situations that until now were very complex and/or costly.
All these transformations lead to a need to digitize many other facets of human interaction, and that is where the metaverse finally comes in, as a natural evolution of human-machine interaction, in purely virtual contexts.
Image: Created by rawpixel.com – http://www.freepik.es
We are an Advanced Data Analytics company that makes amazing things possible by applying Public Cloud Technology and Artificial Intelligence to your data.