AWS News Blog
Say Hello To Our Newest AWS Community Heroes (Fall 2017 Edition)
The AWS Community Heroes program helps shine a spotlight on some of the innovative work being done by rockstar AWS developers around the globe. Marrying cloud expertise with a passion for community building and education, these heroes share their time and knowledge across social media and through in-person events. Heroes also actively help drive community-led tracks at conferences. At this year’s re:Invent, many Heroes will be speaking during the Monday Community Day track.
This November, we are thrilled to have four Heroes joining our network of cloud innovators. Without further ado, meet to our newest AWS Community Heroes!
Anh Ho Viet is the founder of AWS Vietnam User Group, Co-founder & CEO of OSAM, an AWS Consulting Partner in Vietnam, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and a cloud lover.
At OSAM, Anh and his enthusiastic team have helped many companies, from SMBs to Enterprises, move to the cloud with AWS. They offer a wide range of services, including migration, consultation, architecture, and solution design on AWS. Anh’s vision for OSAM is beyond a cloud service provider; the company will take part in building a complete AWS ecosystem in Vietnam, where other companies are encouraged to become AWS partners through training and collaboration activities.
In 2016, Anh founded the AWS Vietnam User Group as a channel to share knowledge and hands-on experience among cloud practitioners. Since then, the community has reached more than 4,800 members and is still expanding. The group holds monthly meetups, connects many SMEs to AWS experts, and provides real-time, free-of-charge consultancy to startups. In August 2017, Anh joined as lead content creator of a program called “Cloud Computing Lectures for Universities” which includes translating AWS documentation & news into Vietnamese, providing students with fundamental, up-to-date knowledge of AWS cloud computing, and supporting students’ career paths.
Thorsten Höger is CEO and Cloud consultant at Taimos, where he is advising customers on how to use AWS. Being a developer, he focuses on improving development processes and automating everything to build efficient deployment pipelines for customers of all sizes.
Before being self-employed, Thorsten worked as a developer and CTO of Germany’s first private bank running on AWS. With his colleagues, he migrated the core banking system to the AWS platform in 2013. Since then he organizes the AWS user group in Stuttgart and is a frequent speaker at Meetups, BarCamps, and other community events.
As a supporter of open source software, Thorsten is maintaining or contributing to several projects on Github, like test frameworks for AWS Lambda, Amazon Alexa, or developer tools for CloudFormation. He is also the maintainer of the Jenkins AWS Pipeline plugin.
In his spare time, he enjoys indoor climbing and cooking.
Yu Zhang (Becky Zhang) is COO of BootDev, which focuses on Big Data solutions on AWS and high concurrency web architecture. Before she helped run BootDev, she was working at Yubis IT Solutions as an operations manager.
Becky plays a key role in the AWS User Group Shanghai (AWSUGSH), regularly organizing AWS UG events including AWS Tech Meetups and happy hours, gathering AWS talent together to communicate the latest technology and AWS services. As a female in technology industry, Becky is keen on promoting Women in Tech and encourages more woman to get involved in the community.
Becky also connects the China AWS User Group with user groups in other regions, including Korea, Japan, and Thailand. She was invited as a panelist at AWS re:Invent 2016 and spoke at the Seoul AWS Summit this April to introduce AWS User Group Shanghai and communicate with other AWS User Groups around the world.
Besides events, Becky also promotes the Shanghai AWS User Group by posting AWS-related tech articles, event forecasts, and event reports to Weibo, Twitter, Meetup.com, and WeChat (which now has over 2000 official account followers).
Nilesh Vaghela is the founder of ElectroMech Corporation, an AWS Cloud and open source focused company (the company started as an open source motto). Nilesh has been very active in the Linux community since 1998. He started working with AWS Cloud technologies in 2013 and in 2014 he trained a dedicated cloud team and started full support of AWS cloud services as an AWS Standard Consulting Partner. He always works to establish and encourage cloud and open source communities.
He started the AWS Meetup community in Ahmedabad in 2014 and as of now 12 Meetups have been conducted, focusing on various AWS technologies. The Meetup has quickly grown to include over 2000 members. Nilesh also created a Facebook group for AWS enthusiasts in Ahmedabad, with over 1500 members.
Apart from the AWS Meetup, Nilesh has delivered a number of seminars, workshops, and talks around AWS introduction and awareness, at various organizations, as well as at colleges and universities. He has also been active in working with startups, presenting AWS services overviews and discussing how startups can benefit the most from using AWS services.
Nilesh is Red Hat Linux Technologies and AWS Cloud Technologies trainer as well.
To learn more about the AWS Community Heroes Program and how to get involved with your local AWS community, click here.