Meet the Gurus

Ryan is the first person to be recognized as both an AWS Community Hero and an Alexa Champion; and so far, over 135,000 students have taken his AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course. He loves being a cloud geek and enjoys sharing his knowledge with the community as an online educator. Ryan's courses are all cloud-based, and accommodate both absolute beginners and seasoned professionals. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn, where he frequently shares the latest from the Cloud.

As a founder of A Cloud Guru, Sam and has helped hundreds of thousands of engineers level-up their AWS skills. He leads the ACG engineering team in building their unique training platform with innovative AWS serverless architectures. Sam has an extensive software development background, having managed engineering teams of 30-40 people including developers, QA and UX. Previously he worked for Microsoft in both Seattle and Oslo. He was part of the Windows team, and owned the Disk Defragmenter for Windows Vista and Windows 7, and then moved to the FAST Search team.

Faye has worked in the IT industry for around 20 years, working with mission-critical systems across a wide range of industries including financial services, telecommunications, government, and healthcare. She’s passionate about cloud technology and knows first hand how important it is to keep your skills up to date so that you can get to work on the coolest projects out there. Feel free to connect with Faye on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Scott has been in the IT field for over 25, most of which has been in technology leadership positions within large enterprises and global organizations. Working in the retail, apparel, footwear, automotive, manufacturing and professional services industries, Scott served as Enterprise Architect, SAP Technical Director, Software Development Manager, IT Operations Manager, Agile Coach, and Innovation Program Manager. If Scott ever makes it on Jeopardy, his dream categories are "Craft Beers of the US", "80's Heavy Metal Bands", "Kevin Smith Movies", "Jason Isbell Lyrics" and "The Simpsons".

Mattias has had many roles in software, since 2001—including architecture, coding, project management, security, training, mentoring, and team leadership. Mattias achieved all 5 AWS Pro and Associate certifications in just 5 months, scoring over 90% on each one. He then also achieved Google’s Professional Cloud Architect and Associate Cloud Engineer certifications—and was chosen by Google to be one of their Subject Matter Experts for the latter.

Nick is a Cloud Engineer and Linux System Administrator who holds all 5 AWS Certifications, plus the LPIC1 and LPIC2 certifications. He's a co-author of our AWS Certified DevOps Professional Course and a prolific creator of Alexa skills.

Lars is an author, trainer, Microsoft MVP, community leader, aspiring Microsoft Azure expert and part-time classic car collector. He is heavily involved in the space of cloud computing services, especially Azure, loves HoloLens and mixed reality, and is a published author, solution architect, and writer for numerous publications. He has spoken at numerous technical events around the world and is an expert in Australian Outback Internet.

Julian's a software developer by trade but has always had a passion for sharing information and breaking down complex concepts to basic building blocks. From starting off as a software developer on the ACG platform, Julian's made the move to a full-time instructor and has found his passion by focusing on all things serverless. In his spare time, he builds web apps, plays video games and trains Jiu-Jitsu.

Brock is an experienced software developer and technical instructor, and one of the newest members of the ACG Instructor team. Before joining ACG, he worked on enterprise software solutions for the US government. Building software and teaching the world to cloud are his professional passions! When not researching, developing, or teaching, Brock enjoys speedsolving puzzle cubes (even blind solving), homebrewing craft beer, and playing baseball.