Benefits of becoming an AWS Community Builder

The first time I heard about the AWS Community Builders program was back in 2020, in a blog post on the AWS website.

When I briefly read the blog post, I thought that it sounded like a great opportunity, and although I had experience working with cloud services, and AWS services (among others), I am not a developer, so I am not the target audience of this program.

A couple of weeks after the blog was posted, I was approached by Boaz Ziniman (in 2020 he was a principal developer advocate in AWS), and he offered me to fill in the application forms for the AWS Community Builders program. He told me that AWS is looking for people from the cloud community, who share knowledge about AWS services, regardless of whether they are developers or not.

For me, writing blog posts (and later on several books about cloud security), sharing my personal experience, and explaining how services work and what are their capabilities, take a large portion of my free time.

What’s in it for me?

The first question you may ask yourself is — why should I apply for this program?

First and foremost, it provides you with a sense of community. You get to know people from all over the world. You can create partnerships, for working on mutual projects — from writing blog posts to creating open-source projects.

As a community builder, you gain access to a close Slack workspace, with channels in many topics (from containers, machine learning, security, etc.), where other members share knowledge (mostly blog posts, and videos), and ask questions (and get answers).

One of the huge benefits of this program, is webinars (some under NDA), where you are presented with new features or services directly from the various AWS product groups before they are publicly announced, and if you wish, you can ask for access to the beta/preview of new capabilities, so you will be able to gain experience, and once released, you can be one of the first people who write a blog post about those new capabilities.

As a community builder, you are invited to post in Dev.to (under the AWS channel), or in a dedicated AWS platform called community.aws

AWS encourages you to gain hands-on experience, and once you join the program (and every year when you renew your membership), you receive 500$ of credits to use in your AWS account.

How do you apply for the Community Builders program?

Anyone above the age of 18, who works with the AWS platform is welcome to fill in an application form, and application requests are being reviewed once a year.

As long as you can provide evidence about your experience with the AWS platform (blog posts, videos, open-source contributions, presentations, etc.), your application will be reviewed.

The formal community builders page can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/community-builders/, where you will find all the details about the program, including the application form.

Once you join the community builders’ program, your membership remains valid for one year, and before the year ends, you will be asked if you wish to renew your membership for another year.

As an AWS community builder, you are encouraged to join webinars and virtual calls, and you are expected to share and produce educational and technical content about AWS services, for the benefit of anyone who uses the AWS platform.

I am not a developer, so I do not share code samples, however, every time I come across a topic that I believe does not get enough attention (from new services to different capabilities of existing services), I write a blog post and share it via my social media accounts.

What about fun staff?

Once you join the program, or renew your membership, you get nice swags. This is not the goal of becoming an AWS community builder, but some of the swags are pretty useful for your daily life:

Your content does not go unnoticed. From time to time, the AWS community builder’s managers from AWS randomly choose community builders’ posts, and grant you credits to use in the AWS platform, and some useful swags (from t-shirts, coffee mugs, hoodies, and more).

Summary

There are probably more benefits and information about this program that I might have forgotten over the past couple of years being a member of this program, but if you work on the AWS platform as part of your daily job, and you have a passion for creating content for the benefits of industry members around the world, I invite you to apply for this program. Do not worry if your application is not approved — you can always apply next year.

To conclude this post, I would personally like to thank Jason Dunn, the AWS Community Builders program manager, and the local team in Israel — Boaz Ziniman and Maish Saidel-Keesing for acknowledging my contribution to the program.

About the author

Eyal Estrin is a cloud and information security architect, an AWS Community Builder, and the author of the books Cloud Security Handbook and Security for Cloud Native Applications, with more than 20 years in the IT industry.

You can connect with him on social media (https://linktr.ee/eyalestrin).

Opinions are his own and not the views of his employer.