Since September 2023, I’ve looked at thousands of job postings (I’ve applied to over 1,000…). I would venture to say that, definitely for full stack related jobs (and back end and front end), well over 50% of them all “require” a web services environment. While some just say “any of the big three” (AWS, GCP, Azure), a majority spell out requiring AWS experience, which I’ve been told is considered the gold standard. (Yes, the C# and .NET jobs all require Azure.) Unfortunately, having been at a rather old-school employer who still did on-premises servers, I had zero experience. So in hopes of getting my experience more leveled up with many of the other developers, I decided it was time to learn more about Amazon Web Services.
Learning the Amazon Web Services at first was… overwhelming. It really came down to learning… what’s the big deal? Having designed applications before, I was used to developing an application core, some minor Operating System setup, file systems (for files), databases, network access (using LDAP), SharePoint Users, SharePoint Groups, Atlassian Suite (JIRA, BitBucket, Jenkins), and more. All AWS really felt like to me is… all their different product and service names for versions of all these concepts that, as an experienced full-stack developer (and server designer), I was already intimately familiar with. Though I have to say that, having seen the existence of over the past year container technologies (Docker and Kubernetes come to mind) and database technologies (other relational and non-relational databases), I had a few light bulb moments of understanding how things are now structured and connected and the big why.
Using some internet searches and going through some of the classes, I am putting myself on an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and Certified Cloud Developer Track now and eventually others later.
Classes that I took (in this order) and their Certificates of Completion:
- AWS Skill Builder Learner Guide
- Getting Started with AWS Cloud Essentials
- AWS Technical Essentials
- Introduction to AWS Certification
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials
- Job Roles in the Cloud
- AWS Billing and Cost Management
- Introduction to Serverless Development
- Introduction to Containers
- AWS Fargate Overview
- Deep Dive on Container Security
- Getting into the Serverless Mindset
- AWS Lambda Foundations
- Amazon DynamoDB for Serverless Architectures
- Getting Started with DevOps on AWS
- Amazon API Gateway for Serverless Applications
- Architecting Serverless Applications
Having taken these classes, I will try to figure out how to have a dirt-cheap personal AWS site and application…