jicowan@proton.me | LinkedIn | GitHub | Medium
I’m a technology professional based in Chicago, Illinois with 25+ years of experience. For the last 6 years my focus area has been Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem with an emphasis on cloud-native security and networking. I am passionate about working with and learning from customers, creating solutions to complex problems, and mentoring.
Cloud Computing | Cloud Native | Generative AI | Container Orchestration (Kubernetes) | Observability | Container Networking and Security | GitOps | Python | Golang
AWS (Jan 2024 - Present)
I am responsible for creating learning paths and content (presentations, workshops, etc) about Generative AI for technical roles across AWS. The content covers a wide range of topics including model selection and evaluation, common use cases, and AI services from AWS such as Bedrock, SageMaker Jumpstart, and Amazon Q. My primary objective is to increase AI fluency and the field's technical accumen.
AWS (Dec 2021 - Dec 2023)
I managed a global developer advocacy team for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). The team interfaced with developers across multiple channels to collect feedback about their experiences while using EKS. They used this feedback, along with their own experience as practitioners, to represent “the voice of the customer” during feature ideation and prioritization sessions. The team educated developers about EKS by creating a variety of content that reduced friction, improved customer outcomes, and increased customer satisfaction. The team also participated in upstream, open-source communities in order to sustain the health of those communities and represent AWS and its customers’ interests. As manager, I set the vision for the team and oversee its activities, verifying that our content is bar-raising and our feedback is actionable.
- Created and implemented a grassroots marketing campaign that grew subscribers to Containers from the Couch, a YouTube channel devoted to running containers on AWS, from 6,200 to 23,200 in 2 years and received 816K views during that timeframe. The campaign revolved around a content plan that focused on educating the community about new features, partner solutions, and common use cases.
- Led an expansion of the EKS Best Practices Guide to include all of the pillars of the well-architected framework. The guide provides recommendations for day 2 operations for Kubernetes and receives approximately 1M views per year.
- Launched an EKS newsletter summarizing new service features, blogs, videos, and news from the open souce community. Since launching in February 2022 newsletter has gained 3,500 subscribers and the archive has been viewed over 60K times.
- Partnered with the AWS Signer team to build a Kubernetes controller for validating image signatures created by AWS Signer. Collaborated with open source engineers to add support for AWS Signer to Ratify and Notation. Worked with Nirmata to add support for AWS Signer to Kyverno. As a result of this work, the AWS Signer team was able to launch support for image signing with multiple options for validating signatures.
- Chose the themes, planned the agenda, and bar-raised the content for AWS Container Day, a (virtual) day-zero event held at Kubecon NA and EU in 2021 during the pandemic. Both events peaked 10K+ attendees and received an overall CSAT score of 4.4 out of 5.0.
- Led an effort to revamp the EKS Workshop, the flagship workshop for learning about Amazon EKS. Created a style guide along with a governance model for managing the project that divvied responsibility for planning and authoring new content among working group chairs. Developed test automation framework for testing PRs which reduced bugs by 50%+ while increasing our feature/content velocity by 20%. Recently added content for the developer persona to the workshop that aligns with the 12 factor app pattern.
- Implemented a program to mine and aggregate data across a variety of online communities and used it measure community growth, customer sentiment, trending conversations, and our responsiveness to issues/bugs reported by the community. This data was used by multiple teams when reporting to upper management.
- Wrote onboarding plans for new employees. Provided coaching and mentoring for direct reports on an ongoing basis. Co-developed growth plans for each employees outlining their career objectives, major accomplishments and their alignment with the Amazon leadership principles, and gaps in experience. When employees were ready for a promotion, I wrote their promotion documents and presented arguments for their promotion.
- Created operational plans (OPs) that focused on short and long terms team goals. These plans included specific details on emerging trends such as GenAI, GitOps, etc headcount needs, key metrics, and business drivers. The plans were underpinned by data collected from the community through surveys, social media, or in-person during customer meetings.
- Collaborated with key stakeholders in Product, Engineering, and Marketing to develop a content strategy. Streamlined the review processs to ensure content consistently met Product’s expectations, delivered on time, and coincided with official messaging.
- Worked with Product Managers to identify and prioritize product/features and enhancements based on our customer’s feedback.
- Oversaw the creation of feature narratives based on customer feedback.
AWS (June 2021 - December 2021)
I was responsible creating different types of content, interfacing with developers, feature ideation and prioritization, bug bashes, and annual/mid-year planning sessions. I worked across teams on a variety of different initiatives such as feature launches, workshops, product documentation, training, and internal enablement. I served at mentor to other advocates on the team and implemented a program to up-level the field’s knowledge of Kubernetes in order to help the team scale. I represented AWS at conferences, briefed industry analysts about our product roadmap and strategy, and led customer briefings.
- Gave a talk at Cloud Native SecurityCon 2023 on using eBPF to detect potential security threats. Also gave talks at re:Invent and multiple AWS Summits and meetups.
- Was a founding member of the AWS Collective on Stackoverflow earning 400+ reputation points within the first 6 months which was among the top 5% for reputational change. Answered user’s questions posted to the #EKS channel in the Kubernetes workspace and Reddit.
- Incubated new features prior to launch. Prepared friction logs describing areas of friction that could impede feature adoption, and recommeded improvements for subsequent versions.
- Created a mechanism for deploying a patch for the log4shell exploit so that customers could quickly patch their Kubernetes environments.
- Working backward from customer requirements, I wrote several feature narratives (PRFAQs) describing who the feature was for, the potential business opportunity, the feature and the problems it addresses, the ideal customer experience, and a list success criteria.
- Co-authored the Kubernetes documentation on hard and soft mutli-tenancy.
- Mentored junior members of my team, interviewed job applicants, and took part in annual calibration meetings.
- Worked with Product to created a content shopping list that advanced our business goals, evalutated potential authors, and bar raised content before it was published to the AWS Containers Blog.
AWS (April 2018 - June 2021)
As a Specialist Solution Architect, I was responsible for educating AWS's largest and most strategic customers [the Fortune 100] about the different services AWS has for running containerized workloads, conducting architectural design reviews, developing migration plans, and building reference implementations and prototypes to address limitations in our services.
- Wrote a Kubernetes mutating webhook to fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. The project also included a Kubernetes operator that would automatically rotate secrets when a change occurred in Secrets Manager. The project was initially created to workaround Fargate’s inability to run DaemonSets or mount EBS volumes.
- Created the EKS Best Practices Guides, a collection of recommendations for operating Kubernetes clusters. Since its release in 2020, the guides have served as a model for other services such as EMR on EKS and Observability. I continue to be the primary author and maintainer of the EKS Best Practices Guides.
- Founding member and leader of the Container Technical Field Community (TFC), a community of subject matter experts and those who aspire to become container SMEs. As TFC leader I was responsible for creating internal enablement, defining graduation requirements, bar-raising content created by new members, mentoring and coaching, and monitoring member activities after graduation.
- Wrote an adapter for Gamelift FleetIQ, enabling game servers managed by Agones to run on inexpensive Spot instances while minimizing interruptions. By running game servers on instances managed by FleetIQ, studios can significantly lower their costs and risks when launching new game titles. A fork of the project is currently being used by a large game studio in Japan.
- Delivered a Chalk Talk an re:Invent 2019 on Building High Availability Apps that explained how working backward from SLOs and SLAs should guide you when designing your environment for high availability. It covered various tools and techniques, including anti-affinity, health probes, autoscaling, replication, and service meshes. The session was at full capacity and received a 4.6/5 CSAT rating.
- Wrote an authentication plugin that allows the Kubelet to authenticate to ECR using an OICD provider. The plugin was developed for a large SaaS provider that wanted to use ECR to vend its images to customers.
- Wrote a blog series [1, 2, 3, 4] on using different CNIs with Amazon EKS. The blogs were in response to customers who wanted to use a common standard across their on-premises and cloud environments.
- Wrote a Kubernetes operator for managing EKS Fargate profiles from the Kubernetes API.
AWS (March 2015 - April 2018)
As the first Solution Architect hired in Illinois, I was responsible for covering all of the northern mid-West territory for AWS. As AWS grew, I shifted to cover the largest enterprise accounts in the region by revenue. My primary job was to educate customers about cloud computing and convince them that it was safe, trustworthy, and reliable. Oftentimes, this involved creating PoCs, reference architectures, and conducting well-architected reviews, product overviews, and deep-dives.
- Senior Systems Engineer, vCloud Air | VMware | June 2013 - March 2015
- Cloud Evangelist | Microsoft | June 2012 - June 2013
- Office 365 Technical Specialist | Microsoft | November 2010 - June 2012
- Account Technology Strategist | Microsoft | March 2004 - December 2010
- Account Manager, Telco and M&E Vertical | Microsoft | July 2008 - June 2009
- Exchange Technology Sales Professional | Microsoft | March 2003 - February 2004
- Senior Consultant | Microsoft | March 2000 - February 2003
- Consultant and Technical Project Manager | IBM | October 1996 - March 2000
Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy (1989 - 1993)
Computer Science (2002 - 2003)