Every software engineer has to understand the specifics and best practices of software design, development and infrastructure management. The best way to master this knowledge is by following the example of the market leader. Luckily, it is simple to do this with DevOps — as AWS DevOps best practices and advice is freely available in a form of an extensive knowledge base, multiple YouTUbe and Twitch videos, detailed FAQ guides, etc.

Amazon Web Services released its public cloud back in 2006. It first included only the Elastic Compute instances (EC2) ans Secure Storage (S3) offers and that was enough at the time. However, over the 15 years, AWS has delivered support for a ton of useful products and services:

  • Continuous Integration (CodePipeline),
  • Continuous Deployment (CodeDeploy), 
  • monitoring (CloudWatch), 
  • security (CloudTrail), 
  • CDN (CloudFront), 
  • serverless computing (AWS Lambda),
  • message broker (Amazon SQS),
  • resource allocation (VPC)
  • distributed databases (Aurora, RedSHift, RDS, etc)
  • container management (Amazon EKS and Fargate)
  • Big Data analytics tools (Apache Spark, Kafka, etc)

and more than 150 other offers. Why is this so important for any software engineer? Because it works. 

You can watch AWS guides on building solutions that allow achieving various business objectives to understand the logic behind every system. This way, even if you will not use Amazon Web Services and will replace the showcased components with alternatives, the system will work. Understanding the way the services are organized at AWS helps design and implement your projects using third-party open-source alternatives.

In addition, more and more customers prefer using the AWS cloud platform and AWS products in particular, as this is a guarantee of successful system operations. Therefore, if you have such an understanding, it will be easier for you to successfully deliver the expected results and accomplish customer projects.

This is the logic behind IT Svit decision to undergo AWS certification for all of our DevOps engineers. Not only will it allow them to prove their high skill with AWS products and services, but it will also allow us to showcase the “AWS-certified” badge on the website. This is important for a Managed DevOps Services Provider — but the same stands true for any other company.

Naturally, AWS is not the only cloud provider out there and its tools are not the only ones DevOps engineers can be using. It would be great to be also certified by Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform from HashiCorp, Google Cloud and other platforms — yet AWS expertise is the cornerstone of building a successful DevOps career. It is also the backbone of most successful projects, as literally any cloud infrastructure can benefit from adding a couple of AWS products to it.

More importantly, AWS provides access to many of its products under the PaaS model, where developers can build the systems they need for work without ever having to handle the server configuration, as all the components are managed by AWS staff. While this is more costly than using the IaaS approach and configuring all the system dependencies yourself, it also saves a lot of time and effort for beginners.

However, the best approach when dealing with AWS is surely to hire a team of professionals that can guarantee there will be no costly mistakes due to misconfiguration. Working with trustworthy DevOps engineers from reputed DevOps services providers will help you save a ton of time and money and get the best experience when using AWS services.