Learning from AWS

No question AWS is built by great people. It’s 200+ services are used by huge enterprises hitting databases at 5M+ queries per second and by startups who are good with free tier. AWS has yearly conference called re:Invent which publishes thousands of videos delivered by best people in industry. After watching & listening hundreds, if not thousands of hours of these, I have a list of “most favorites”. The ones that are not only delivering quality information about some service or concept but the ones that hit my mind with new ways to see things.

Here is the current list:

DynamoDB and databases in general. The answers are here.

Rick Houlihan is delivering such a stream of info that you probably won’t be able to digest it. Luckily it’s on YouTube, so can re-watch multiple times to get it. One of the rare cases when I do recommend to watch at 1x speed. Probably even multiple times.

How to tame the Unicorns. Deep dive into IAM access policies.

The most enthusiastic talk on access policies ever. That’s how you deliver the speech on topic which is mostly considered “boring” for people. Brigid Johnson does it. Excellent knowledge streamed to you with a big smile on a face. I would consider this talk as a foundation to learn about access policies system. Brigid covered some advanced topics, gave the mind unlocks on how to think about access policies and now it’s up to you to Google more and dive deep into the topic.

Serverless. Better operations, reliability, security, performance and cost

Serverless is coming to all areas of tech. It can deliver much better operations, reliability, security, performance and cost. The 5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Heitor Lessa delivers talk on different architectural patterns and best practices in serverless world. This talk could be great starting point to go google the things out and find great ways to build great tech.

Serverless SaaS factory

Tod Golding has excellent experience constructing architecture for SaaS solutions. He shares his deep knowledge in the field in this talk. This is the eye opener on how regular software differs from professional grade software.

If you are early in this journey

These are my best findings for people to get the general overview of main AWS services, to ignite the learning and to start discovering the clouds. These courses are to get you ready for basic tier AWS certificates. If you are really thinking to get those, I would highly recommend to consider only the higher tier ones. While mid-low tier certificates are too easy to get to provide real benefit on your resume, in my opinion.