Our story is proof that anyone can become a cloud guru

Back in 2015, Ryan went to interview for a role at Amazon. They didnʼt hire him. It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.

Preparing for the interview was difficult. The only training available at the time cost over $2,000, and the content was awfully dull. Spending an entire week back in the classroom listening to a lecturer pontificate on the differences between services triggered tiresome memories from university, so he began scouring the internet in search of a better option. Frustrated by his unsuccessful search, Ryan was inspired to create a better option. He recorded content every night for the next 6 weeks in his make-shift recording studio, which was actually the bedroom in his tiny London flat that he had taped foam to the walls to help with noise. In those early recordings, you could hear a car drive by or his kids playing in the other room, but he didnʼt mind. He was an engineer, not a career trainer.

After the course was complete, Ryan submitted it on a popular training site, and drove across town to take his AWS Solutions Architect - Associate exam. He thought if he earned £50 from the course it would pay back the cost of the mic, and therefore the project would be a success. Then his phone started vibrating. It literally went off 200 times during his exam. It never stopped vibrating. In a matter of weeks, his course had hit 8,000 paid users. The success ignited Ryanʼs entrepreneurial spirit.

Excited about his small success, but unsure of what to make of it, Ryan phoned his brother Sam, who was living 12 hours away in Melbourne, Australia. Sam was a software developer and had helped build Windows 7 at Microsoft, so Ryan knew he was the perfect person to partner with. They chatted late into the night, or early morning depending which side of the phone you were on, about how that they could help other students looking for a better way to learn the cloud. They asked themselves “Could we build the biggest cloud computing school on the planet? Could we build THE place to learn cloud?”

At the time, Sam was working a full-time job. He had some holiday leave available, so he hopped on a plane to Tasmania with his wife and kids. While his family enjoyed their vacation, he locked himself away in a bedroom with the mission to build a learning platform in 4 weeks. He knew that to do that, he had to come up with a new approach. He used the latest technologies from Amazon and built an entirely 'serverless' system making A Cloud Guru the world's first serverless startup. Sam worked out that he would be able to launch the school to market in 4 weeks if he could leverage the work of others. With no ops team, just 2 brothers, they knew they wouldnʼt be able to manage infrastructure and also scale quickly. In only 28 days, Sam built a complete learning management platform. He had discussion forums. He had payments processing. What companies spend years building using traditional server based architectures, Sam built in less than 30 days.