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Amazon Web Services: IT service management company
AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications — whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.
Cloud computing with AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
Benefits at a Glance
Easy to use:
AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications — whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.
Flexible:
AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services you need. With AWS, you receive a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires. This eases the migration process for existing applications while preserving options for building new solutions.
Cost-Effective:
You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.
Reliable:
With AWS, you take advantage of a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online business that has been honed for over a decade.
Scalable and high-performance:
Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to compute and storage resources when you need them.
Secure:
AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. For more information, see the AWS Security Center.
What kind of job is AWS?
An AWS engineer is an IT professional who creates, maintains, and evolves an AWS cloud infrastructure for running applications. These infrastructures include production, test, and development environments.
The Tools of an AWS Engineer
In this case, we’re using the words “tools” and “skills” interchangeably, considering that the terms blend into each other, and they’re both resources for getting the job done.
A good AWS engineer needs:
- Experience using AWS (that’s just common sense)
- Experience designing and building web environments on AWS, which includes working with services like EC2, ELB, RDS, and S3
- Experience building and maintaining cloud-native applications
- A solid background in Linux/Unix and Windows server system administration
- Experience using DevOps tools in a cloud environment, such as Ansible, Artifactory, Docker, GitHub, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Maven, and Sonar Qube
- Experience installing and configuring different application servers such as JBoss, Tomcat, and WebLogic
- Experience using monitoring solutions like CloudWatch, ELK Stack, and Prometheus
- An understanding of writing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), using tools like CloudFormation or Terraform
- Knowledge of one or more of the most-used programming languages available for today’s cloud computing (i.e., SQL data, XML data, R math, Clojure math, Haskell functional, Erlang functional, Python procedural, and Go procedural languages)
- Experience in troubleshooting distributed systems
- Proficiency in script development and scripting languages
- The ability to be a team player
- The ability and skill to train other people in procedural and technical topics
- Strong communication and collaboration skills
As a special aside, an AWS engineer who works in DevOps should also have experience with:
- The theory, concepts, and real-world application of Continuous Delivery (CD), which requires familiarity with tools like AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline
- An understanding of automation
The AWS Engineer Learning Path
There is a lot to learn, but fortunately, there is an AWS learning path you can follow that will get you to the ultimate destination.
Most AWS cloud engineers start by getting at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, information technology, or some other related technical major. Then, you’ll need to supplement your education by spending some time in the software development field, generally three to five years. Note that some corporations expect a total of 10 years of related systems engineering experience.
Much of the time spent in software development should include working with programming languages such as AngularJS, C++, Java, and Python. Additionally, you should have experience in several tech tools and platforms like Hadoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, Redshift, Scala, Spark, and SQL. You should then round out all of the above skills and experience by developing skills in DevOps, Docker, and Linux.
Cybersecurity is a major concern these days; consequently, cloud engineers should have some cybersecurity skills in their toolbox. According to McAfee, 40 percent of IT professionals have stalled their cloud migration projects over security concerns and a lack of cybersecurity expertise.
Many educational institutions have classes in any of the above skills that you can’t acquire on the job. A few continuing education courses can help fill those knowledge gaps nicely; you can even take night classes if you happen to have a day job.
Where are the AWS Engineer Jobs?
In the interest of full disclosure, the term “AWS cloud engineer” is vague. There are so many different roles available to an AWS engineer that it makes more sense to break it down further into specific functions. To that end, here’s a list of the 15 different career paths that an AWS cloud engineer can take. The positions most in demand today, according to Indeed, are as follows:
- Back-end developer
- Cloud engineer
- Data engineer
- Data scientist
- Development operations engineer
- Front-end developer
- Full-stack developer
- Java developer
- .NET developer
- Senior Java developer
- Senior software engineer
- Software architect
- Systems administrator
- Software engineer
- System engineer
