Last week, I had the pleasure to sit down in a Twitter Space with Chris Williams and other AWS Community members to chat about Chris’s journey from a traditionally VMware/Infrastructure background to one in which he now lives and breaths public cloud and cloud native technologies. Not only is Chris deep into the technology… but he has also brought over his passion and drive of a technical community and advocacy across and has successfully transitioned the once VMware dominated vBrownBag Podcast to be one which is more focused on AWS and other public cloud/cloud native technologies.

That’s not to say that Chris has turned his back on the communities that helped elevate him and others to were they are today, but it does represent a brilliant story of change and adaptation as well as bringing lessons learnt from building previous communities to new technical communities.

To dive in to the convo, listen to the Podcast above or below. Note that recorded Twitter spaces only stay up for 30 days by default.

User Groups, Hero’s and Community Builders

One thing I wanted to get out of having Chris on this Twitter Space was in order to learn a little more about the AWS Hero and Community Builders programs. In the past few weeks I have been reaching out to various members of both communities to understand a little more about them and how they compared to the vExpert community.

There seems to be some overlap, but from talking to Chris and others it seems that approx. 60% of the Community Builders are from a developer background and 40% come from more traditional platform operations and infrastructure backgrounds. In truth, I probably found that number to be a little higher than expected.

Certainly if you look at the Hero’s there are very distinct disciplines which leads to a more exclusive intake. Then they even have SuperPowers.

We then talked about the AWS User Groups which have exploded even more than I remembered back when they first started. They seen to have become the dominate Tech User Group going round. Memberships upwards of 8000 is not uncommon. That said, I think that this is representative of the sheer scale of AWS’s dominance in the Public Cloud space.

Again, these three things and a lot more where discussed in the Twitter Space… listen below!

Thanks to Chris and the others that joined the Twitter space.