As we dive into 2025, we’re thrilled to announce our latest group of AWS Heroes! These exceptional individuals have demonstrated outstanding expertise and innovation, and are committed to sharing knowledge. Their contributions to the AWS community are greatly appreciated, and today we’re excited to celebrate them.

Ahmed Bebars – New Jersey, USA

Container Hero Ahmed Bebars is a Principal Engineer at The New York Times, where he leads the design and delivery of scalable developer platforms that enhance productivity and empower engineering teams. With deep expertise in containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies, Ahmed builds robust infrastructure solutions that streamline development workflows and support innovation. As an active member of the AWS and Cloud Native communities, he frequently shares his expertise at events like KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, AWS Community Days, and Kubernetes Community Days. Through his initiative, “Level Up with Ahmed,” he shares practical insights and resources to help engineers grow their skills and stay ahead in the evolving tech landscape.

Badri Narayanan Kesavan – Singapore

Community Hero Badri Narayanan Kesavan is an Engineering Lead and Solutions Architect with over a decade of professional experience, specializing in AWS Cloud solutions, platform engineering, and DevOps automation. Badri’s passion lies in learning and sharing with the community. He has delivered several talks at AWS Singapore Summit, AWS Summit ASEAN 2023, AWS Community Days, and various user group meetups. As an active AWS community leader, he organizes meetups and workshops under the AWS Singapore User Group where he regularly conducts sessions on diverse AWS topics, engaging a wide audience to foster innovation and collaboration. He has also authored the book “Mastering Amazon EC2)” which is a comprehensive guide to building robust and resilient applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Marcelo Paiva – Goiânia, Brazil

Community Hero Marcelo Paiva has over 30 years of experience in technology and is the CTO at Softprime Soluções, leading product development and research in digital biometrics, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence (AI). With more than a decade working with cloud computing, he specializes in building scalable and innovative solutions using AWS. Passionate about tech communities, Marcelo founded the AWS User Group in Goiânia in 2018, helping grow the local community. Today, he organizes events such as JoinCommunity and Cloud Summit Cerrado, fostering learning and networking in the Cerrado region.

Raphael Jambalos – Quezon City, Philippines

Community Hero Raphael Jambalos manages the Cloud Native development team at eCloudValley Philippines. His team has implemented dozens of cloud-native applications across multiple industries for customers in the Philippines. He is active in helping the AWS User Groups grow in the Philippines, and is passionate about connecting with the community beyond Manila. In his free time, he loves to read books and write about cloud technologies on his Dev.to blog.

Stav Ochakovski – Tel Aviv, Israel

Container Hero Stav Ochakovski is a DevOps Engineer at Beacon and a cybersecurity expert, managing highly scalable multi-cloud environments. With a background in DevOps engineering and instruction, Stav seamlessly transitioned into the dynamic cybersecurity start-up scene. A champion of container technologies and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), she brings deep expertise in Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and logging solutions to the AWS community. Stav actively shares her expertise by speaking at AWS community events, as well as security and container conferences. She is also a leader of the Israel AWS User Group and is a pastry-chef school graduate and licensed skipper.

Learn More

Visit the AWS Heroes website if you’d like to learn more about the AWS Heroes program, or to connect with a Hero near you.

— Taylor