Elena Rodríguez

Elena started on AWS in 2013, in the EC2-Classic era — when "moving to the cloud" was rewriting half your application around networking constraints that no longer exist. She has spent the last decade-plus across all three major hyperscalers, currently as principal platform engineer at a US-based SaaS company where her team owns the multi-cloud reliability story.

Her credentials include the AWS Solutions Architect — Professional, AWS Security — Specialty, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, and the Google Professional Cloud Architect. She mentors her engineering team through SAA-C03 every quarter — usually two or three engineers at a time, the same blueprint repeated until the patterns click.

Her writing on Cert Climb focuses on the AWS scenario items that trip up otherwise-competent engineers: encryption-at-rest defaults across services, when to reach for an SQS dead-letter queue versus an SNS retry, where IAM identity-based and resource-based policies diverge in ways the SAA blueprint glosses over. Less "what does this acronym mean", more "what answer is the exam looking for, and why".