How did you hear about the ACE Program?
Nick Foss: Back in COVID when everything was all over the place, and no one knew what they were going to do, I was sitting at home doing an IT job, and I really wasn't enjoying it. I got an email from my father one day, and he said, "Hey, you should look into this. They're offering free certification programs, You can study up and pass them." So I said, alright, sure. I looked into it, and it was like, you can take a free ACE Associate exam. There's an eight hour course you can watch, and then you can go take the exam. So I said, sure. And I took a day off work, went to the eight hour course and then went and took the exam, and I actually was able to pass it at the time. And that kind of set me on this whole path now of how I got into the cloud, and a whole bunch of things like that.
What is your favorite part about the ACE Program?
Nick Foss: A couple of cool things about the ACE Program is that Aviatrix really focused on not just their product but cloud as a whole and kind of the idea of where cloud is going. I took the CompTIA Security+ and the Security+ asked me a lot of questions that were, you know, like data center or they were Cisco or there was something specific that didn't really apply to everything. The ACE Program, even though it seems like it would be like, oh, it's about this one particular thing. It was more about understanding cloud networking than it was just about how the ACE Program does it.
How will you leverage the skills you learned through the ACE Program going forward?
Nick Foss: One of the main things I think I'll do is, you know, these ACE skills are really not specific to just Aviatrix. They're not specifically related to just cloud. A lot of them are just a mixture of all of the different parts of the industry. So it gives me the idea on cloud, and one of the big pushes with Aviatrix is that multicloud. They work in OCI, AWS, GCP, all of those different cloud instances. The ability to take that and apply any of the knowledge, apply all of that knowledge, apply all of that that's learned throughout using this Aviatrix platform, and apply that to all the different clouds is something that will always be helpful because with how fast this industry moves, being able to learn a little bit about all of these different fields to then expand on that is a big deal. is a big deal.
