A commitment to grow

For the last several years, Kickstep Technologies has leveraged the power of Amazon's AWS cloud services to meet the solution needs of our customers. These projects have given us experience in AWS technologies and best practices, but at the end of the day, we knew we were just one of countless consultancies who preached about their proficiencies with various cloud services.

In 2018, we elected to start investing in a journey that would not only challenge us, but it would prove to our current and future customers that we were both highly competent in AWS technologies & best practices and that we were fully committed to maintaining our knowledge and experience in these areas. We decided to register as a Consulting Partner in AWS's Partner Network and begin progressing through APN's Consulting Partner tiers.

The more your learn, the more you realize how much you don't know

In the middle of 2018, we would have probably considered ourselves highly knowledgeable and competent when it came to AWS technologies and solutions we could build within its ecosystem. We started looking at the requirements for reaching the APN Select and Advanced Tier status of the Consulting Partner journey and didn't really think the technical aspects of those tiers would be much of a challenge. After all, we'd built solutions for different clients. We'd setup federated security, we'd built CloudFormation templates, we'd written serverless code triggered by CloudWatch and API Gateway. How much more could there be to learn?

It turns out, quite a bit. As our staff continue to progress through various accreditations and certifications, they're continually amazed at how much detail exists in the nuances of AWS services. More importantly, they continue to grow their appreciation about how those nuances can mean the difference between a good solution and a great solution.

It's a journey, not a destination. Hubris and egos need to be checked.

It's clear that there is no resting on this journey. Since we've made this commitment, we've ended each day smarter than we were at the beginning which fuels are quest to keep learning. However, that also means that tomorrow, and next week, and next month we're going to know things we don't know today. Still, that has made us stronger as an individual, as a team, as a consultancy and as a partner for our clients. It acts as a continual reminder that ego and hubris need to be checked and that we need to rely on tools such as peer reviews and guidance advice from our Amazon contacts within the APN to make sure that our clients are receiving the best solution possible, not just the best solution one person or team could come up with.