Notes

How I Became an AWS Hero

From filling Amazon.com orders in the '90s to running 100+ AWS services in production. Sixteen years of cloud across healthcare, defense, satellite, and rural New Mexico — and the road to AWS Hero.
July 7, 2024 · 5 min · 947 words · Bryan Chasko

Day one on AWS, and the sixteen years since

The Las Cruces Bulletin once called our work “cutting-edge health technology going global.” Here is the longer story of how I got there.

Where I started

  • US Army Special Operations — my first hands-on with electronics, ethical hacking, and working under pressure
  • New York Institute of Photography alumni
  • Raised in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains, still happiest on a trail
  • Top 5000 in EA’s Madden NFL three times, always as the Patriots
  • An 80s kid who grew up on an MS-DOS machine near Yuma Proving Grounds
  • AWS Hero since 2018, known for community work and spatial computing
  • One cat, named Buddy

The through-line

My history with Amazon started small: fulfilling orders through early Amazon.com and building sites that earned a little on the side through Amazon Associates. Those years taught me Amazon’s leadership principles and showed me how the flywheel applies to industries far beyond books.

Over sixteen years on AWS I have kept coming back to the same problems — data access, visualization, accessibility, and user experience — across game tech, media, motion-capture labs, depth cameras, 3D pipelines, WebGL, and game engines. That range is the point. It builds a toolkit you can reach for in any domain.

My rule of thumb: use technology to hide technology. The best systems disappear behind the work they let people do.

What I have built

Healthcare and business

  • Rebuilt broken infrastructure at a company running on VPNs and undocumented local servers, clearing a decade of tech debt
  • Ran marketing, SEO, and social analytics as a PR executive, which pulled me straight into EC2 and VPC
  • Modernized SOAP and REST operations, then moved teams onto GraphQL and event-driven architectures
  • Widened access to caregiving technology for patients and clinics while running R&D and capital-raise cycles

Public and private sector

  • Restored technology and cybersecurity across a 16-campus school district serving 6,000+ students and staff
  • Built satellite and mobile data pipelines for utilities and climate modeling, and led early Amazon Kuiper private-networking work

AWS depth

  • IoT, SageMaker Neo, Lambda, AR/VR, remote patient monitoring, and workplace safety
  • Serverless since 2014, edge communications since 2015, AI and ambient interfaces since 2017
  • Security, compliance, and audit across healthcare, defense, and mobile and satellite communications

I have deployed more than 100 AWS services in production. A representative slice:

  • Compute and containers: EC2, Lambda, Fargate, Elastic Beanstalk, Graviton, Lightsail
  • Storage: S3, Glacier, EBS, EFS, FSx, Storage Gateway
  • Data and analytics: RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift, ElastiCache, Kinesis, EMR, Glue, QuickSight, Data Pipeline
  • Networking and delivery: VPC, CloudFront, Route 53, API Gateway, Direct Connect, Elastic Load Balancing, Local Zones
  • AI and ML: Bedrock, Rekognition, Polly, Lex, Comprehend, Medical Comprehend, Q Developer, DeepLens
  • IoT and edge: IoT Core, IoT Greengrass, IoT SiteWise, IoT 1-Click, Panorama, Kinesis Video Streams
  • Spatial and media: Sumerian, Nimble Studio, Lumberyard, Open 3D Engine, Chime
  • Security and identity: IAM, KMS, Cognito, GuardDuty, Macie, Secrets Manager, WAF, Audit Manager, Wickr, Certificate Manager
  • DevOps and delivery: CloudFormation, CDK, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, CloudTrail, X-Ray, Systems Manager, Control Tower, Organizations
  • App and productivity: Amplify, AppSync, SES, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, WorkSpaces, Location Service, CloudScape Design System

On the road for AWS

  • Represented AWS at Summits in New York City and Chicago
  • Exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show ten times and the Game Developers Conference twice
  • Gave AWS community talks in Dublin, Boston, Portland, Manhattan, and San Francisco

How I lead

I lead by getting out of people’s way. Servant leadership, for me, means removing barriers, building environments where good work is the path of least resistance, and measuring myself by what the team ships.

  • Organized more than three dozen meetups
  • Founded AWS User Group RGC3, NM + Borderplex, for self-taught builders
  • Lead the NE3D Blender and graphic-design meetup in Boston

The technical journey

Military and early career. I trained in electronics, mechanics, and hazardous materials, and taught National Guard units to stand up power for deployments to Afghanistan. Public speaking under pressure started there. During university I ran greenhouses for a Walmart supplier, which is where industrial automation stopped being theory.

A 15-year startup arc. I moved from field sales to managing phone-sales teams, international logistics, and technology transitions — building intranet systems, running warehouse operations, and pushing analog systems onto IP. Each step added a layer.

Downturn and rebuild. When the recession closed a security company that leaned on big-box retail, I went back to school and joined a healthcare startup. That role grew into search marketing, web design, content, and PR — hundreds of sites deployed and press coverage across 16 states.

Bigger stages. Interviews with The Washington Post, CBS, and PCMag came out of tackling real infrastructure and tech-debt problems alongside partners like Intel, Dell, Google, and AWS. The company became New Mexico’s only mid-cap value stock and climbed Inc’s list of fastest-growing private firms.

Telecom and advanced tech. More recently I have built data pipelines for utilities and climate modeling for universities, working with private mobile, satellite, and remote networking.

Aging in place with AWS

To help seniors stay in their homes longer, I used AWS to build augmented-reality health monitoring — real-time monitoring and support that keeps care close without keeping people in facilities.

“We want to keep people in their homes longer than previous generations.” — Bryan Chasko

Rural, small business, and garage inventors

Since 2020 I have pointed my attention at the community level: grassroots conversations about what cloud and AI can do for people who are usually last in line for it. AWS hands everyone the same supercomputing and 200-plus tools that Amazon.com runs on. That is the whole pitch — a small shop can compete with the giants when the infrastructure is the same.