 Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at AWS ReInvent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors Amazon and Trend Micro. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Amazon ReInvent. Amazon Web Services big conference. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the event. They extract the sizzling noise. Our next guest is Maureen Lonergan, Director of Training and Certification at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Happy to be here. So there's so much training and education here. It's like almost a university like environment. Andy Jassy proudly saying on stage, we're not a sales and marketing event. We're about sharing a lot of information. So that's your thing going on. Yeah. I mean, give us the breakdown. How much training? What are the sessions like? What's certification like? So we ran over the last two days. We've run 17 boot camps, training thousands of people across 17 different topics. In addition to that, we have a self-based labs room where we're delivering 50 self-based labs and people can drop in and take either a service-oriented lab or a solution-based lab and in addition to that, we're delivering hundreds of certifications as well. So a lot of people are saying that the cloud eliminates specialism and actually you got to be more general purpose now in the enterprise. So one of our guests earlier was like, that's the big inflection point they're seeing. He used to be, I'm the storage guy, I'm the network guy, I'm doing this. We're now on IT with cloud. You can do a lot of different things. How does that change some of the certification challenges, just more certification? Is there a generalist kind of certification? I think the way we've looked at it is we look at three different roles within the cloud. We look at architect, operations and developer, and whether you're a startup or an enterprise, you have different skills that are required. So we started with those three roles and started to build out curriculum and certification to map to those. And as time has evolved, on Friday we announced that we launched a DevOps engineer. We're starting to see not only role-based, but things that really impact the culture and the change management of cloud. And so we started to invest in developing classes and certifications that support that. Startups generally have been born in the cloud and have those skill sets. But as we move to enterprises, they're looking for us to help re-skill their employees. So what's the biggest change in education and trend certification? It used to be like, get your certificate, you're a Cisco, UCS, whatever, engineer. Is it similar now or is there new things that are changing with how you go through that process? I think learning overall is changing for everybody, but I think we want to make sure, we in Amazon believe we need to support a learning culture within our customers and our partners, and as such, we're building e-learning and instructor-led courses and labs so that people can take training when they want. People that with traditional CIS admin skills can transition those skills and we're working with enterprises to do that, but we want to make sure that we develop the right content for them at the right time. You know, I was talking with Jeff Barr last night, he was chief evangelist, and he was the first guy doing it, and he was blogging basically. So blogging was a big way to embrace the community, share information, certainly, social media is about sharing. Do you guys weave anything social media into it? Is it all like just courseware? Yeah, we're starting to weave some social media. We're starting this, actually this event, we have a certification lounge. We're starting to bring our certified professionals together as a community and provide them with opportunities to meet with each other, and as we evolve in the next year, we're going to start to embrace that a bit more. Social learning is really, really important and getting these people together to practice and ideas is really important. Is there a lot of online courseware? There is a lot, we do have a lot of online courseware. So you've seen that explode. People love to work online. Sorry? They love to work online, you've seen a lot of people doing that. Yeah, I think it depends. We adjust for every learner, right? We want to make sure that, you know, I think developers traditionally like to get it when they need it, and you know, in other traditional roles, they want to be in a classroom. So we're making sure we make, our courses available in both mediums. Okay, so here's a real question everyone wants to know. What's the hottest tracks here at this show? That's a really good question. I think anything... I mean, the line's working. You know, I think the DevOps tracks, where they're talking about continuous innovation, I think is the highest rated ones. And which one is that? Just more infrastructure deployment, more developer? Is it more business? Do you guys mix and match? Yeah, it's mixed. I mean, we have 275 tracks, and I've been walking around. I don't know the numbers for every room, but I think it's... How many tracks? 275? 275, I think. That's a lot. Yep, it's a lot. When do you find a lot of people to train these people? Yeah. Have a train the trainer, like a seminar? Yeah. That must be challenging. We recruit our subject matter experts to deliver those sessions. We want to make sure that we're given our customers and our partners the content from the people that know the information. All right, so what's the craziest thing you've seen here at the show, or weirdest thing in a good way, in a good weird, like, it's been exciting. I've actually been surprised at how excited people are just to get these little buttons around certification. I mean, to be honest, I didn't think it would be so powerful, but people are very excited, and they want to demonstrate their knowledge, and I think it's great. And they like to be proud, kind of like show the badge of honor. Yeah, yeah. What's that booth you guys had taking pictures out there? Yeah, we do. We have a social media, but as you come out of the certification, and when you've passed, you have the opportunity to take your picture and post it in Jeff's blogging about a lot of stuff. We've got roaming video around. Is that kind of like a selfie? Yeah, totally a selfie, right? People are into it, though. They love it, so it's great. I know. And you know what? It's a way for that community to connect, so it's great. Well, it's a natural sharing thing. Learning is a great group environment, and having online classes is good. I mean, I've noticed that, like, Twitter, and it gets very noisy, so like, if you have an environment where you can pull people together and share in a very easily, not like spammy way, that's good on social media. But to learn, though, you've got to drill down, and you know, there's been a lot of great startups, because Sierra has a lot of like EDU startups out there. Are you guys tapping into any of that external or is it all driven from internal to Amazon? We are actually, we're partnering with a lot of universities across the globe to get our content out there right now, and we're going to involve that academic program, and we're looking at other big mooks out there and figuring out how we get our content to those, the people that are attending those organizations as well. So how do you get involved with the folks watching out there? What should they do? Is there a URL? What's the onboarding process? How can they tip their toes in the water? They want to jump right in. Yeah, they can go to Amazon.training.com and they can tip, and we have free labs available, free videos. We have a lot of free e-learning available, and depending on what they're looking at or where their skill set is, gives them an opportunity to just try it out even if they've never seen it. And then as they progress and get more interest, we have very prescriptive learning paths for them to choose from. So I was just typing in here training.amazon.com? No, Amazon.training.com. Amazon.training.com. That's a good URL, training.com. What is it? Oh, she got a clarification from the crowd. Training.amazon.com? Okay, www.aws.training. AWS.training. Sorry. AWS.training. No, no, this is the crowd. We love the input from the crowd. We just launched it, actually. We're one of the first companies to have the training training as a way. Well, I mean, that's how people learn. I mean, when they walk in, this is the one thing we talk about all the time in theCUBE. Dave Vellante and I, especially in like big data and DevOps, people are seeing their DevOps guys and they're not and that offends the real DevOps guys or I'm a data scientist. Well, some people are like, well, you're just an analyst or you're not really a date. So it's like a, it's sort of a blurring of the lines between people want to start seeing, I hate to say being more credential, because that sounds elitist, but like just some sort of filter to differentiate. Yeah, and that's what we did with the DevOps engineer. I think, you know, DevOps is really, really as a culture or methodology, but if you go out and you look at the job site, there's lots of people looking for DevOps engineers. I Googled it last week and there were thousands of jobs and how do we help our customers identify people with those skill sets and that's really why we're making the investment in educating people, you know, in those methodologies and validating them with certification. So I think there's a lot of excitement around that. Well, certainly you're getting the vote from the top of the company, Andy Jassy on stage, really tipping up the learning and it really is amazing. I'm seeing lines waiting, you know, get there 30 minutes if you don't get in front of the top. I mean, it's hard core. It's exciting though, you know. That means the active community. Yeah, it is, definitely is. Maureen Lonninger, thanks so much for joining us on the queue here. Breaking down the training, the certification, real mass rush and charging the training banks, if you will, to get trained up and if you look probably looking for more trainers, how do you onboard more trainers? Yeah, we like anyone. We interview the best in the industry and then we have a very thorough authorized training program that we put people through. We spend months ramping them up. We want to make sure that they're true evangelists really for Amazon and that they're able to help our customers with their requirements. And they've got to be subject matter experts. They've got to be fluent in the material too as well. Definitely. And it's, you know, it's an agile environment and things keep iterating it. So it's really critical that people the trainers that we hire are really comfortable in the learning culture because they're required to get updated every single week. So the people that are motivated and driven by that are really the most successful trainers that we have. That's awesome. Well, training's very important. Obviously in emerging markets like cloud, you got a shift and an inflection point happening at the same time. It's pretty powerful. This is the queue. We're extracting the Seal and Noise Marine right here inside the queue. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Reinvent Live in Las Vegas.