Ryan — Kroonenburg

"I was studying for my own AWS certifications," Ryan explained in a 2019 interview. "I bought the official study guides, but they were boring. They read like legal documents. I thought, there has to be a better way to learn this. "

After retraining himself, Kroonenburg secured positions as a cloud architect and developer. A pivotal moment occurred when he applied for a formal position at Amazon Web Services . Though he was ultimately rejected for the role, the preparation process exposed him to the staggering financial cost of official cloud certification courses. Sensing a clear market failure—high demand for cloud talent but financially inaccessible training—he set out to construct an alternative online curriculum.

If you want to replicate even 1% of Ryan’s success, there are three distinct takeaways from his career:

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A Cloud Guru quickly took off, attracting hundreds of thousands of students through word of mouth within the developer community. The brothers bootstrapped the company for its first two years, staying profitable by keeping overhead low via their serverless architecture.

: Breaking down complex architectural concepts into "snackable" videos.

The platform grew around active discussion forums where students could troubleshoot errors, share study advice, and celebrate passing their certification milestones. Scaling to an Industry Powerhouse "I was studying for my own AWS certifications,"

In a world of slick PowerPoint slides, Ryan often returns to the digital whiteboard. Drawing diagrams in real-time forces the student to follow the logic step-by-step. He once said in an interview, "If I can’t explain a VPC flow log with a drawing, I don’t understand it well enough to teach it."

Worked at companies like Sungard Availability Services and Smart421, managing complex enterprise systems with hundreds of servers and multi-data center failover.

This pivotal rejection revealed a massive gap in the market. While trying to upskill, Kroonenburg noticed that existing corporate AWS training was prohibitively expensive and strictly structured. Recognizing an opportunity to democratize this knowledge, he partnered with his brother, Sam Kroonenburg, to establish an online training platform. The Birth and Rise of A Cloud Guru I thought, there has to be a better way to learn this

By 2017, the platform had trained more than 250,000 students across 160 countries.

Kroonenburg set his sights on working directly for Amazon Web Services . However, after interviewing for a position at Amazon, he was ultimately rejected. During his preparation for that role, he noticed a critical flaw in the market: official AWS training and professional courses were prohibitively expensive, often costing thousands of dollars for multi-day boot camps.

Ryan didn't just explain what a command did; he explained why you would use it in a production environment. He brought real-world war stories to the screen. Students felt like they were sitting next to a senior engineer guiding them through a crisis, rather than a professor lecturing from an ivory tower.

: The full suite of his updated labs and certification paths can be found on the A Cloud Guru website . What to Know About Udemy - U.S. News & World Report