Why did an Aerospace Engineer become AWS Solutions ArchitectAssociate Certified?

“In life, you are either a passenger or a pilot — It’s your choice.”

W. Juin Lee
3 min readJul 9, 2020
AWS Cloud AWS Solutions Architect — Associate Certification

As an Aerospace Engineer, I can say with much certainty that based on my experience and talking to leaders in the industry that the aviation sector is in dire need of a technological revolution, especially when travel resumes in a post-pandemic world. This is where cloud computing can be used in areas such as flight crew optimization, predictive maintenance, and data generated from bookings and reservation systems to optimize profit margins as airports are forced to slash their capacity to abide by safe distancing measures. While many airlines have accelerated their digitalization to provide better customer service and self-check-in processes. Cloud technologies remove single points of failure and airlines can utilize cloud services for resiliency zones, backup options, and redundancy without putting resources into expanding IT infrastructures to meet the demand of digitalization.

For example, AWS services can keep their critical systems running to make sure stored backups are secure by storing their data in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) in multiple regions and availability zones to ensure sufficient backup and disaster recovery, and have notifications via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) in place for monitoring and backup status. From that example, the benefits of the cloud for airports and airlines are clear. Therefore, I look forward to being able to participate and lead the industry in harnessing the reliability and scalability of cloud computing in the aviation sector.

Solution architecture of Amazon RDS events notification using Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda

With no background in cloud computing, my first contact with cloud computing was through AWS Educate. It stood out to me as it was able to combine the providing of related career pathways and promoting new computing skills through earning badges. This enabled me to pick up skills that are highly in demand by the industry at no cost and successfully completed labs while attending AWS Educate Virtual Classrooms and AWS Academy Cloud Foundation, and Cloud Architecting under the guidance of my on-campus educator Teo Shin Jen who is an AWS Cloud Ambassador himself. Fast Forward a year later, I grew to use and understand more AWS Services and took the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate certification exam to validate my skills and understanding of performing a solutions architect role and designs highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS for my projects and work.

Wei Juin’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate Certification

Special Thanks to Teo Shin Jen, AWS Cloud Ambassador for his guidance and support in my journey to the cloud!

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W. Juin Lee
W. Juin Lee

Written by W. Juin Lee

I am a Hackathon Enthusiast with a passion for new and emerging technologies out there! 👨‍💻: leeweijuin.com