Nigerian wonderkid becomes youngest cloud practitioner in Africa

Add as a preferred source

Joshua Agboola, a young programmer, speaker on technology topics, and YouTuber, added another medal to his list of achievements, by becoming the youngest Certified Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner in Africa at the age of 13, after passing the AWS Cloud Practitioner test.

Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third-party providers and made available to users through the internet.

When asked what inspired him to accomplish this feat, Joshua responded: “I had known for a while that Cloud Computing was one of the growing areas of the IT sector and one of the defining technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolution. But its importance became very visible to me when I had to employ MongoDB, on one of the Artificial Intelligence projects I was working on.

“MongoDB is a document-oriented database for high-volume storage. It provided flexibility, and the ability for data storage of different volumes because it was cloud-based. This got me curious to study more about the cloud. However, the idea of going deeper in my search for knowledge, and getting certified was first muted by my dad”.

On why he chose the AWS route to get certified, Joshua explained; “The range of services and solutions provided by Amazon Web Services is very wide. AWS is the current leader in the Cloud Computing space, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud.

“I decided to follow the leader because I believe AWS will continue to dominate the space for years to come. Besides, I found that there was quite an awesome amount of training resources from Amazon itself, and from other members of the cloud community on AWS Cloud certifications that made the learning and certification journey easier for me”.

When asked what next after the certification, Joshua explained that he wanted to apply the knowledge he had acquired from AWS to the projects he is currently working on.

“I want to utilise my knowledge from the Cloud Practitioner certification to ensure that I can engage the cloud in the most cost effective way for my AI projects,” the 13-year-old said.

He further revealed that he desires to play in the DevOps Engineering space, and aspires to own a Cloud Services company one day.

“I am actually of the opinion that adults keep underestimating what we young people can do if given the right environment.

“Imagine a programme saying I would have to be 18 before I can learn cloud. If I didn’t have options, what I just accomplished could have been buried because of this limitation.

“So, my other motivation for achieving this feat is to demonstrate to my young friends what we are capable of doing and to also show that great brains are coming out of Africa,” he told TRIBUNE ONLINE.