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Does anyone have experience in AWS?
by
Kathy Jean-Joseph
I have a lot of questions and would appreciate speaking with someone who has the background.
Hey Kathy, AWS is not really beginner friendly and even experienced engineers find it daunting to use. You mentioned that someone steered you to AWS. I wouldn't suggest starting with AWS if you are trying to break into the industry. Are you familiar with web application development, since AWS is used to deploy server infrastructure basic knowledge of how web servers work and command line usage can be very beneficial. If you are trying to to switch careers, I would suggest starting with the basics of web development. There are lot of free resources like https://www.freecodecamp.org/ and https://www.codecademy.com/. Hope this helps.
Yes it does! Thank you! It looks like Python or JS and Front End Development would be better suited to get started if I want to just jump in quickly. I will continue to learn about it all in tandem, I'm just more aware that AWS and IaaS & PaaS won't make as much sense until I start to dig deeper.
It depends on what is trying to accomplish. If you are building a product, AWS is pretty complex to learn within a set amount of time. I am a software engineer and work with AWS S3, Redshift, Lambda on a day to day basis. A lot of what goes on the background is unclear and harder to understand given the limited time and hoards of tasks we have to handle. Same for the senior engineers working for way longer.
The issue is if things don't work, you have to take a look inside the background. For example, maybe you set it all right and the product works fine. But when the demands start growing and you need to scale your infrastructure up and things break, you have to get into the rabbit hole again. No one is going to fix it for you. In the end, you end up a lot of time getting your setup to work at the start as well as during scaling it up rather than working on developing your product faster (which is more important)
If you have a big team and plenty of resources, sure you can appoint a few only to focus on AWS. But if you are the only person working on your product or have a small team, it's a bad bad idea.
Professionally and for personal purposes I use Heroku. They do the hard lifting for you to get the setup right so you can focus on what matters most.
But if your goal is to learn it, well start reading the docs, start attending the online conferences, and work through it.
I can help you !! Wht are u struggling with ??
Currently learning on Linux Academy and Codecademy before I start looking at this again but thanks so much for reaching out.
Hi Kathy. I'm currently working on 3 projects hosted on different services on AWS and it is.... difficult :) If you'e just starting out your project/s and trying things out, you would be better off working with simpler cloud services like Digital Ocean, Heroku or Cloudways. If you really want to dip your toes into AWS, try out their Lightsail service. It's a preconfigured server which you can pay a fixed monthly fee for a fixed configuration and resource limits.
I want to thank everyone for their honest advice! I really appreciate it!
The only service of AWS I'm good at is S3 for storage. For the rest, is still an exploration to me.
Add CloudFront and EC2 to that list, and that's about it for me. ;) With those three things you can do a lot though!
Thanks. I'll add them to the list.
I set my app’s infrastructure up on AWS, feel free to msg me and I’ll try to help! (Or you can just comment if the questions aren’t private)
What AWS topic/s are your questions about?
@Jsnmtr & @wantan — Someone steered me to AWS because they thought that I would be good at it but because I have a traditional marketing background, I'm not sure where to begin to excel. I've just been taking the Linux Academy classes and I both like and understand them but what would someone like me need to realistically succeed in pivoting to cloud engineering and IT? So that's question number 1 and it kinda just snowballs from there people.
Coming from a pretty experienced software engineer, AWS is very difficult to set up. None of the UI is intuitive, it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot, there’s whole books on many of the services, the tutorials out there are awful/outdated, you can rack up huge bills accidentally, etc.
If you’re learning it to build on it, I would recommend against it. It should only be for companies that need that massive flexibility and know what they’re doing (I shouldn’t have set mine up on it).
If you’re learning it for mastery of a skill that you’ll later provide as a service to others, it’s going to be a tough road, because not only do you have to learn the esoteric AWS way of doing things, which itself is a challenge, but the concepts of the services it provides and why it’s needed, which dives into Linux, networking, security, distributed systems, databases, and much more.
I would try one level lower first, which is a single private server on DigitalOcean or Linode, before trying to figure out the monstrosity of AWS.
I'm going to look those up to learn! Thank you! DigitalOcean & Linode, noted.
Here to help :) AWS is a platform designed to provide infrastructure as a service (and well other things as well but let's start there). So a way to think about it is that you might have a traditional company that has a network, mail server and traditional desktop PCs; well with AWS you can create those server resources and mail services etc., in a shared data center rather than having to buy and maintain all the infrastructure yourself.
Some beenfits for this is you only pay for what you need (this includes RAM, CPUs , Storage etc.,). You can also script the deployment of this so if you ever need recover for whatever reason it's very quick and easy to setup. You can also maintain security ina central location and, well, lots of great reasons I could do into.
There's also things like serverless architecture where you use services provided by AWS to serve websites, APIs, mobile apps etc., very quickly and easily without having to setup and maintain physical hardware, even in the public data center; you just pay the time and storage the resource uses.
I suggest checking out some of the "acloudguru" courses via Udemy and other learning sites; they are great and targetted for all types of audiences.
What @Rhodesie said is a good overview. What I d like to add is:
1- AWS use can range from simply using S3 storage services to host some data to a sophisticated server system architecture that includes web servers, app servers, file servers, mail servers, database servers to name few.
2-AWS courses on Linux Academy is a good place to start. Also check the AWS YouTube channel in case you haven't yet.
3- Using AWS or any other cloud architecture will take away the need of physically maintaining/upgrading you server hardware
4- One more advice I d like to add is that never do anything just because someone steered you towards or just because It makes money.Any person can be good and excel at anything as long as you are passionate about the subject and interested in it. The way you are exploring the subject is a great way to start.
Good luck!
JM
Thank you for being both realistic yet still positive! It doesn't look like a quick thing but I just have to keep going and see how far it takes me.
Don't feel rushed to learn ALL AWS or any other language/platform/cloud. AWS is a huge octopus with millions of tentacles and always generating new ones! Start with an overall understanding to basics then dive in and learn more about the areas you need in a project you are working on.
Thank you! I did see A Cloud Guru's site and it's really between them and Linux Academy. Maybe in the near future, I'll end up doing both to compare the course information and get a well-rounded view of the topics.