Insights

Somos’ Jeff Zhao Earns Prestigious Professional Certification

May 10, 2017

Jeff Zhao, a Site Reliability Engineer at Somos, recently joined an elite group of technologists by completing his Professional Certification as a Solutions Architect in Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Doing so makes him one of a small but growing number of technical professionals worldwide to have earned such distinction.

AWS Architects have proven to be essential for most companies as the trend of leveraging cloud computing to improve efficiencies, reliabilities and securing systems continue to grow in popularity. Today’s Solutions Architects find themselves challenged daily with the requirement of sustaining service availability, balanced with managing the cost of expensive capacity and software associated with today’s complex systems. For this reason, many companies, like Somos, have opted to have one of their own employees seek AWS certification in order to bring more of their systems administration “in-house”.

Jeff started as a member of Somos’ IT team, with responsibilities for designing and implementing much of the company’s corporate infrastructure.  Jeff proved to be a natural fit for engineering and transitioning into the IT department placed him in a position to pursue his initial training in AWS.  His aspiration for personal growth proved to be a seamless match for Somos, who’s corporate culture encourages its employees to be their absolute best.

After completing his AWS Associate Level certification, both Jeff and Somos quickly realized that a more comprehensive understanding of AWS capabilities would be essential for the ever evolving telecommunications industry. Jeff explains it, “Now, after setting up the initial environment to host new applications or databases, I leverage my new new found automation skills to build out environments in minutes, where doing so manually took hours or even days.”

Sanjeev Chauhan, Somos’ Director of Architecture and Software Development encouraged Jeff to learn and become certified in AWS technologies.  He sees the time and effort involved in becoming AWS certified as being more than worth it. “Having Jeff as a certified AWS professional provides significant value to us,” Sanjeev explains. “If Jeff was not able to do that, Somos would have to rely on a third party to provide that capability. Having him certified in AWS places us in control and provides Somos with the upper hand.”