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AWS re:Invent Special: The AWS Cloud Institute with Kevin Kelly

·27 min·2 clips

Kevin Kelly, a 14-year AWS veteran, describes how re:Invent grew from a small event to taking over Las Vegas with 60,000 attendees.

This episode is part of Software Engineering Daily's onsite coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas. Host Jordy Mon Company speaks with Kevin Kelly, who has been with AWS for nearly 15 years and leads the AWS Cloud Institute. Kelly describes the evolution of re:Invent from a small event to one with 60,000 attendees. He outlines AWS's educational offerings, including programs like AWS Get IT, AWS Educate, AWS Academy, AWS Skill Builder, AWS Restart, and the AWS Cloud Institute. The AWS Cloud Institute is a 12-course program over a year, teaching Python, APIs, distributed systems, and virtualization, with over 100 labs and two capstone projects. It leads to AWS Cloud Practitioner and Developer Associate certifications. Kelly mentions AWS's commitment to train 29 million people by 2025, with over 21 million already trained, and a new AI Ready commitment to train 2 million young learners by 2025. He discusses the importance of generative AI skills, with tools like AWS Code Whisperer integrated into training. Kelly shares stories of career pivots, such as a musician and hospitality worker transitioning to cloud roles through AWS programs. He explains the use of gamified learning tools like Cloud Quest and AWS Jam to engage learners. The conversation touches on future trends, including AR/VR in education, and highlights a capstone project where learners built a system to reverse-engineer sheet music from audio. Kelly emphasizes meeting learners where they are with various modalities and building portfolios for job applications.

As heard by us

Cloud education, certifications, and practical tradeoffs anchor the AWS Cloud Institute discussion.

At AWS re:Invent 2023, the episode stays on cloud education and the AWS Cloud Institute, with Kevin Kelly laying out the tradeoffs that matter most: performance, cost, and the gap between knowing the services and using them under pressure.

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Why you'd press play

You want the cloud-career roadmap behind AWS's re:Invent headlines.

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