The Last 6 months at Cloud Academy. What’s Next?

(Update) We’ve recently released some new product features to further enhance your training experience on the Cloud Academy platform.

Hands-on Labs, live cloud environments for your team to build and validate practical experience directly on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Kubernetes, data pipelines, and much more.

Training Plans will help you assign, manage, and measure structured cloud training at scale.

Skill Assessments will help you trend your team’s aptitude by platform, domain, and topic and identify possible skill gaps.

Visit the Cloud Academy Training Library for the latest training material content across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, DevOps, and other cloud ecosystem services. New content and updates are added every month.


After many articles related to cloud computing technologies, new products, and some best practices, it is now the right moment to update you on our goals and the next steps for Cloud Academy. Not many of you know that we had fantastic growth in the last 6 months of 2014. We grew around 20% MoM with new members, visits and site usage. In the last month, we brought online a great redesign of our website. We still have a lot of things to complete, but overall, it’s a great improvement.

Our goal is still the same: we strive to be the first site Cloud experts go to for knowledge and guidance related to Cloud computing.  Of course, not everything is going right. We’re working really hard to update our learning materials day by day. Andrea, our Head of Content, is the guy that reads every feedback we get at Cloud Academy and improves our materials on a daily basis.

How I talked to 500+ members of Cloud Academy and what I learned

In the last six months, I spoke with almost 500 members of Cloud Academy. Intercom.io (a fantastic tool) has been a daily hit for me to talk with you about Cloud Academy, the problems you were facing, giving suggestions on how to start learning Cloud Computing, explaining how Cloud Academy works, and sometimes, trying to understand what was not working for you.

Talking with you I discovered a lot of things I never thought of. I loved it.

A couple of weeks ago I was finishing a book called “Delivering Happiness” (by Zappos.com’s founder) during my flight from Milan to San Francisco. In that book, there are a lot of things that I’m trying to apply to Cloud Academy and I’m sure will be appreciated by you.

Sometimes I start the conversation with some of you to understand if you are enjoying Cloud Academy, but most of the time you write to get some information or clarify doubts.

My Intercom’s page to manage my conversations with you:
Stefano Bellasio's Intercom page

Talking to you we improved Cloud Academy in a way we couldn’t do before. As a new company, you will get a lot of people giving you suggestions, cloud computing experts and gurus that will tell you the “right thing” you should do right now, but at the end of the day the most valuable suggestions are always coming from your members, your customers.

I really have to say Thank you. You are helping us create a better company and a better product. Learning and education are everything but easy.

Based on the conversations we had in the last 6 months, we are now working on new products and changes that you will find very soon at Cloud Academy.

What did I learn from talking with more than 500 of you?

  1. We need to work more on our courses and divide them into “levels”.
  2. CloudCareer is sometimes perceived as a one-time solution, we are making it recurring. We are going to integrate CloudCareer in our subscriptions.
  3. AWS is not enough, we definitely have a lot of people trying to learn other cloud technologies. More platforms.
  4. More data and statistics about your journey to Cloud Academy are needed to guide your learning.
  5. Advanced learning materials need to be more available.
  6. You want to know and get details about our Authors and Instructors.

All of them are priorities. We are addressing some of them and we are scheduling all the others over the next 2 months.

I try to answer every email. In fact, you can always contact me at stefano@cloudacademy.com or with Skype at stefano.bellasio. Sometimes you will not get an answer immediately, just send me a “ping”. I’ll do my best.

I couldn’t do all of this without a great team working with me that I can rely on. We are a small and growing team, but with really talented people, way smarter than me.

Subscriptions and new courses

As you probably noticed, we are now talking about our Subscriptions. On April 2014 we launched CloudCareer for AWS, our first premium product. To be honest, the team and I were quite impressed by the results: a big number of our members today are using CloudCareer to study and prepare for the AWS Certifications.

We have a lot of things that we can improve, but we clearly understand that you want learning materials and structured courses to learn cloud computing and stay up-to-date with your skills. Our subscriptions are going in this direction. We’ll update our content library with new courses, quizzes, and labs every month and you will access all of them for a very fair price.

We’ll have a dedicated plan with more features for companies that want to train their teams about cloud computing. In this case, you will get a special “control panel” to improve your learning experience among your team members.

Building your community

In the last weeks, we started releasing some new tools to improve our community. More are coming in the next weeks. Comments are now available for all of our learning explanations (you get them after every quiz). You can contribute to them or ask for more information right below the single topic. Cloud Academy will save that explanation automatically for you.

Want to read some of the explanations you found in our quizzes again? A new function allows you to save them in a second, and have them in a specific area of your dashboard. You can find all the details on Andrea’s article here.

I’d love to get your comments about what we are doing. You can write in our comments or just drop me an email at stefano@cloudacademy.com.

Cloud Academy