He proved that education does not have to be painful. He proved that you don't need a Ph.D. to teach DevOps; you just need practical experience and empathy. Ryan Kroonenburg democratized cloud computing. He took a field reserved for Silicon Valley elites and opened it to a farmer in Kansas, a student in Mumbai, or a career-changer in London.
"Technology changes every six months. But the ability to think critically, to debug logically, and to keep learning? That is a superpower for life." Whether he is drawing a VPC diagram on a whiteboard or architecting the future of Pluralsight, Ryan Kroonenburg remains the gold standard for what a modern tech educator should be: authentic, brilliant, and relentlessly student-focused. Are you looking to start your cloud journey? Search for "Ryan Kroonenburg AWS Course" to see the original content that started a revolution. ryan kroonenburg
His courses were among the first to heavily feature AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB. Ryan famously argued, "If you are managing a server in 2020, you are doing it wrong." This stance was controversial at the time but proved prophetic. He proved that education does not have to be painful
He has recently been spearheading new course initiatives on how to use AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI Service, and Google’s Vertex AI. His latest thesis is that "AI is the new cloud"—a paradigm shift as large as the shift from on-premise servers to EC2 was in 2008. Ryan Kroonenburg democratized cloud computing
Ryan openly talks about his own failures. He shares stories of accidentally taking down production environments or misconfiguring security groups that led to breaches. By humanizing failure, he gives students permission to struggle, which is the first step to mastery. Ryan Kroonenburg Today: What is He Doing Now? As of 2025, Ryan Kroonenburg remains active in the cloud community, albeit with a slightly lower public profile due to executive duties. He is currently focused on the intersection of Generative AI and Cloud Architecture .
By 2018, A Cloud Guru had millions of users worldwide. Ryan’s face became synonymous with AWS certification success. For every 10 AWS Certified Solutions Architects you met, 9 had likely watched a Ryan Kroonenburg course. The biggest headline in the career of Ryan Kroonenburg came in July 2021. Tech giant Pluralsight, a legacy leader in tech training, acquired A Cloud Guru for approximately $2 billion (the deal combined ACG with Pluralsight's existing cloud content, with the total valuation pegged at around $2B).