I'm Rowan Udell, author of The Practical AWS IAM Guide and one of the most recognized AWS IAM specialists globally. With over 15 years of hands-on AWS experience, I've personally helped dozens of organizations implement secure, scalable access management through my consulting, and many thousands of AWS developers and engineers, via my writing, videos, and community contributions.

As a founding AWS Ambassador and long-standing Community Builder (4 years and counting!), I've been a subject matter expert for AWS certification exams, published on the official AWS Partner Network blog for IAM's 10th anniversary, and spoken at major AWS events including AWS Summit Sydney. My expertise has been featured across many AWS focused community podcasts, and my IAM guidance has become essential reading for AWS security practitioners worldwide.

During this time I have taken part in the AWS Subject Matter Expert (SME) program writing questions for the AWS Certified Security - Specialty exam, which I have held since its beta release in 2018.

Year Activity
2025 June Presented "No Servers Allowed" at the AWS User Group Brisbane (Presentation)
2025 June AWS Community Builder - Year 4
2025 June Invited to give a Community Builder Developer Lounge talk at AWS Summit Sydney 2025 (Presentation)
2025 May Feedback on AWS IAM with Stell Hie@AWS shie@amazon.com
2025 March Securing Production | AWS IAM Security ScaleToZero podcast
2025 AWS Community Day Australia Organising Committee Member
2024 AWS IDC migration commands (Blog post)
2024 Moving from IAM Users to AWS Identity Center (Blog post)
2024 Programmatic AWS Action List! (Blog post)
2024 Find deprecated Lambda runtimes in your environment (Blog post)
2024 Passing the AWS Security Speciality in 2024 (SCS-C02) (Blog post)
2024 Simplifying Just-in-Time Access Governance using Cedar for CommonFate.io
2024 Speaker at ServerlessDays ANZ Sydney (Panel)
2024 YouTube channel
2024 AWS Community Builder
2024 Published 2 blog posts
2024 AWS Summit Sydney Recap panel (Presentation)
2024 So, you've inherited an AWS environment…​ (Presentation)
2024 AWS Certification SME - Specialty (Security)
2023 AWS Ambassador
2023 AWS Community Builder
2023 Published 7 blog posts
2023 Chatting With Cloud Specialist With Over 10 Years Of Hands-On Experience With AWS (Podcast)
2023 Master IAM with Rowan Udell (Podcast)
2023 10 Years of IAM, Writing a Practical IAM Guide, and Serverless Trends (Podcast)
2023 Pre:Reinvent Serverless Panel (Presentation)
2023 Who's driving this thing? Evented serverless applications (Presentation)
2023 The Practical AWS IAM Guide (Book)
2023 AWS Certification SME - Specialty (Security)
2022 AWS Ambassador
2022 AWS Community Builder
2022 Provide feedback and input to IAM Access Analyzer team Brigid Johnson@AWS brigidj@amazon.com
2022 Published 1 blog post
2022 AWS Certification SME - Specialty (Security)
2021 Official APN Blog: IAM's 10th Anniversary blog post
2021 AWS Ambassador
2021 Published 5 blog posts
2021 Painting with IAM: Least Privilege Policies (Presentation)
2020 AWS Ambassador
2020 Published 3 blog posts
2019 AWS Ambassador
2019 Published 5 blog posts
2019 AWS Sydney Partner Summit Technical Keynote (Presentation)
2018 AWS Ambassador
2018 Published 6 blog posts
2018 Serverless Operations (aka. LessOps) (Presentation)
2018 Serverless Workflows using Step Functions with Rowan Udell (Podcast)
2017 AWS Ambassador
2017 Published 9 blog posts
2017 The Serverless Framework: Build a Chatbot (Course)
2017 The AWS Administration Cookbook (Book)
2017 Serverless Experts Panel (Panel)
2017 AWS Sydney Summit Presentation (Presentation)
2017 Serverless as a Consulting Cash Register (now accepting Bitcoin!) (Podcast)
2016 AWS Cloud Warrior
2016 Published 10 blog posts
2016 AWS Experts Panel (Panel)
2016 Apex Presentation at the inaugural Sydney Serverless Meetup (Presentation)