Together with The Campus we organized an in-company AWS training that helped us further into the cloud. Since we were already using the AWS cloud to support our Test Automation Project and started developing SaaS solutions on it, it was time to give our employees enough knowledge of AWS to develop these projects. We contacted The Campus as our training partner and together we organized a suitable AWS training for our colleagues.

In the following interview with Patrick Van Ingelgem, our Managing Partner, and Koen Van Belle, Senior Test Automation Engineer, you’ll discover more about our experience with the platform, our future projects on AWS and our connection with The Campus.

AWS: a decision well made

“The decision to adopt AWS as our cloud provider grew organically”, says Koen. “We had someone in our team who worked with AWS for one of our client’s projects. It was a logical next step for him to start developing internal projects for b.ignited on AWS as well. Once you decide to invest in a cloud provider, you have two options: either you divide your investment over multiple cloud providers, or you invest in one platform. Since AWS is the biggest cloud provider globally, we chose to focus solely on AWS.”

Once we decided upon a cloud provider, it was time to take the next step. “The reason why we started looking for an AWS training was mostly because we have exciting future plans”, Patrick clarifies. “Next to consultancy, we would like to offer a few managed services in the future as well. These services will run on AWS. At the time, we only had two people within our team who had sufficient AWS knowledge to start building these services, which was not enough. It was up to me to give our colleagues the opportunity to attend AWS training in order to acquire the knowledge they needed.”

Fully certified thanks to the AWS training with The Campus

“As we are part of The Cronos Group, it seemed logical to look for a training partner within the group”, says Patrick. “I contacted Hendrik Albrecht, the AWS SPOC within the group. He referred me to The Campus, and that’s how I came into contact with Joy Buelens. We discussed what would be the best course of action to organize an AWS training for our employees. Joy was very helpful.”

The Campus organized an AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials training for us in the autumn of 2021. The training took place at an inspiring location in Antwerp. The Campus chose to organize the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials training to provide all participants with solid foundational knowledge of the AWS cloud.

Koen noticed a positive effect: “I noticed that the training made the whole AWS networking structure a lot clearer for many of my colleagues who were already practicing for the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification exam. The networking structure can be quite complicated sometimes, so the trainer’s explanation certainly helped.” One other positive effect of the training is that b.ignited is now fully AWS certified. “Everyone within b.ignited has now obtained at least one AWS certification. For most of them it’s the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification”, Patrick continues. “But a few of our colleagues have also obtained the AWS Certified Developer - Associate certificate and the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certificate. I can only encourage that! We’re very happy with these results. We certainly recommend the AWS training courses organized by The Campus.”

The future with AWS: the sky is the limit

“First of all, we would like to start working on the managed services we talked about earlier”, declares Patrick. “Then, we would like to open up our Test Data Generator project to the rest of the world. We want to make this service available to testers and development teams worldwide."

“The sky is the limit when it comes to our future plans with AWS”, Koen decides. “I deliberately named our work account in AWS ‘The Playground’ to encourage my colleagues to experiment on AWS. There will always be applications we want to deploy on AWS, and there will always be integrations with other services we can develop on AWS. If we can come up with an idea and it fits within our budget, we can go for it!”