CloudZero founder and CTO Erik Peterson has been named as a member of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ambassador Partner Program. This distinction is for AWS Partner Network (APN) members that are technical experts in various domains as evidenced by obtaining AWS certifications and sharing this knowledge via blogs, white papers, presentations, and open-source projects. AWS announced Peterson as one of its recent inductees.

For Peterson, being recognized as an AWS Ambassador adds another notch to an already lettered tech career. A 20-plus year software startup veteran, Peterson is a founding board member of Serverless Boston, speaks regularly on a range of tech topics, and was recently awarded the FinOps Advisory Council’s Top Contributor Award at FinOps X 2022. Peterson was an early advocate for AWS and has been building cloud software for more than a decade.

“I’ve been a passionate cloud practitioner on AWS for years,” said Peterson. “Since the beginning, it was clear that the cloud had incredible potential — if deployed efficiently. I’ve dedicated a good portion of my career to understanding the technology and sharing the solution with my peers. Being an AWS Ambassador will only enhance and accelerate my ability to do so.”

Peterson’s enthusiasm about the cloud led him to develop CloudZero, an intelligence platform that puts organizations’ cloud spend into a business-relevant context. It uses a code-driven approach to allocate organizations’ cloud spend without tagging, and leverages telemetry to derive granular unit economics based on actual customer and product utilization.

“CloudZero is an engineer’s tool,” said platform engineering lead at Skyscanner, a CloudZero customer, Stuart Davidson. “Engineers are the folks who switch things on and off. Engineers know what should and shouldn’t be running so it’s important to provide them the tools to empower fiscal autonomy when it comes to cloud cost spend. Within two weeks, CloudZero had already found enough savings to pay for a years’ worth of license,” Davidson said. “It was that good — that intuitive.”

“We are happy to welcome Erik Peterson into the AWS Ambassador Partner Program,” said Willie Merino, Senior Technical Program Manager, Worldwide Partner Tech Programs at AWS. “Erik, like all other AWS Ambassadors, holds multiple AWS certifications — an Associate AWS Certified Developer, and a Professional AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — and has in-depth AWS knowledge to further evangelize AWS and our partner organization to customers.”

To qualify for the AWS Ambassador Partner Program, individuals need to be employed by an AWS Partner, hold multiple advanced AWS certifications, contribute to the AWS community — and then be approved by AWS via application.