Goodbye SA - Hello EntReloper

Posted on 5 mins read

Today I start a new journey within AWS. I am happy to announce that today is Day-1 (and it is always Day-1 in Amazon - BTW) in a new role as a Senior Enterprise Developer Advocate in the container services team - focusing on ECS.

In true Amazonian fashion - this is my first attempt at writing a mini-PRFAQ and there is no better way to start than to write one for my new position.

Enterprise Developer Advocate

ISRAEL, June 7th 2021 – Maish Saidel-Keesing will be starting a new position as an Enterprise Developer Advocate for the ECS Service team. The Product Developer Advocates are on a mission to empower and advocate for builders all around the world so that they can create amazing applications with AWS Container Services and advance their just cause. The Container Services team builds and operates services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) that make it easy for customers to run container-based applications in production and at scale. To get started with Amazon Elastic Container Services, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ecs.

Based on research from Gartner, 88% of the enterprises have a cloud first strategy, but on the other hand 86% of the enterprise IT spend on infrastructure, is still directed at on-premises purchases. Enterprise customers and especially traditional enterprise organizations have limitations, history, and legacy processes to maintain and usually will have a substantial amount of on-premises infrastructure that they still need to maintain in parallel while they advance in their journey.

Werner Vogels, VP & CTO at Amazon.com says, “Many of our AWS customers are solving really hard human problems, in ways that is extremely inspiring for any builder, like me.” We consider all of our customers as builders, but in reality - when we talk about builders, we mostly talk about those customers who create software, those who have software development or engineering background, those who write code. With the introduction of this role, we are going to dive deeper with the needs of our enterprise customers, with the teams responsible for the operations, maintenance and security of their infrastructure to assist them to become enablers for their own companies in their journey to the cloud.

We are now expanding our team with an experienced technologist to focus on enterprise adoption of container services. Maish will be the first Developer Advocate with this focus and as such have an opportunity to define a new practice: Enterprise Developer Advocacy.

The role of the Enterprise Developer Advocate will include (but not only):

  • To representing AWS Container Services at industry specific events.
  • To define and develop assets (good practices, reference architectures, demos, code…) that Enterprise customers need to adopt and be successful with container technologies.
  • Experiment on behalf of customers and identify potential areas for improvement in our services.
  • Engage with customers to understand their needs and in turn advocate for them internally with the service teams.
  • To proactively bring customers’ anecdotes, research, business, and industry context to user experience and technical product decisions.
  • To provide guidance on the design, implementation and delivery of a highly complicated product in an ambiguous or new technology area.
  • To work across teams to build solutions for our customers that use containers along with other technologies (ML, IoT, Observability…).  

FAQ

Q: Enterprise Developer Advocate is mouthful – can we just call you a DevReloper?
A DevReloper is a phrase that Corey Quinn loves to use – and because my focus will be on the enterprise (not the starship - yes Corey…), I think it only fitting that I coin a proper term for my new position.

You can call me an EntReloper if you would like.

Q: How does this differ from the role of Solutions Architect?
An AWS solutions architect works closely with their clients on a wide range of solutions and products – based on the customer’s specific needs. As a service team developer advocate, I will continue to work closely with our customers – but the scope of work will be more focused on container services and solutions.

Q: Does this mean you are relocating to the US for the position?
No, I am not relocating. Israel is my home, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I made a conscious decision to adapt my working day to align with the service team that is US based.

Q: Is there a difference between this position and other AWS Developer Advocates?
DA’s that are embedded into the service teams, have deep knowledge of the services they support, and are focused on many customer use cases that incorporate that service within. My focus will be on container services, primarily ECS – but also the supporting and adjacent services as well.

Q: Why did you make the change?
I am always looking to challenge myself, looking for new things to do outside of my comfort zone. I do not consider myself a programmer or a developer. Yes, I dabble in code and write or understand how things work – up there with the best of them, but historically it has been scripting, and infrastructure code. In this position I will be challenging myself to write more code and dive deeper into this area with everything I have. I think in some way I have been doing work that is similar to developer advocacy for many years – but never as my official day job. It was time for a change to get closer to the service teams within AWS and see how I could create a bigger impact on our customers.

Q: What excites you about the new job?
To be honest – so much!! But more than anything that I will be joining a huge community of developer advocates within AWS and that I get to work with amazing people like @realadamjkeller, @nathankpeck, @toricls, @98pm, @deepakkallakuri, @mreferre, @nrh, @clare_liguori, @mndoci and so many others that I am sure I have left out (so please forgive me)!!