AWS
Amazon Web Services — the dominant cloud platform, with more than 30% market share and the largest ecosystem of services.
AWS is the world's largest cloud platform, offering compute (EC2, Lambda), storage (S3), databases (RDS, DynamoDB), networking, and hundreds of specialized services. AWS skills are the most in-demand of any cloud platform, required at a majority of engineering roles that involve infrastructure, deployments, or data pipelines.
Typical time to job-readiness: ~4 months.
Learning AWS
Beginner
Get hands-on with core services on the free tier: EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, and VPC. Deploy a simple web application end-to-end without a framework to understand the plumbing.
Intermediate
Lambda for serverless, CloudFormation or CDK for infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD pipelines with CodePipeline or GitHub Actions. Pursue the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification.
Advanced
Multi-region architecture, cost optimization strategies, and the Solutions Architect Professional or DevOps Professional certification. Senior roles are heavily architecture-focused in interviews.
Key concepts
- IAM — Identity and Access Management; least-privilege access control for every resource
- EC2 for virtual machines, S3 for object storage, RDS for managed relational databases
- VPC — Virtual Private Cloud; your isolated network inside AWS
- Lambda for serverless compute — run code without managing servers
- The shared responsibility model — AWS secures the cloud, you secure what's in it
- Availability Zones and Regions — design for failure across multiple AZs
Common interview topics
- Explain the difference between EC2, Lambda, and ECS/EKS
- How does IAM work and what is the principle of least privilege
- How would you design a highly available architecture on AWS
- What is a VPC and how do subnets, route tables, and security groups work
- How would you reduce costs on an AWS bill