Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Get Upskilled on AWS in 2024?

AWS is leading the world in cloud space, though there are other big names trying very hard to catching up, AWS is making its own exclusive space in Cloud Computing. The major force behind this is the AWS team. AWS team is working on the customer feedback to introduce services/features, having direct relevance to their businesses. They are also bringing their own innovative ideas which are altogether putting them ahead of their nearest competitors by a good ma33rgin.

Amazon too is pumping money into their AWS business, providing them much-needed thrust to remain in the competition in this ever-evolving field of cloud computing.

Now, jump to the crux of this article, why I suggest you be skilled up on AWS in 2024, after all, it’s like any other technology/platform like several others introduced in the recent past, so my answer to this innocent assumption is, NO, AWS Certification IS NOT LIKE ANY OTHER TECHNOLOGY.

Let me explain to you by giving you 10 reasons, they are top reasons as per me, for you, the order may differ in terms of importance, but there is no single point which you can ignore, especially if you are a beginner in this field.

Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Get Upskilled on AWS in 2024

1. Free tier to test the interface and basic functionality

2. Accessibility

3. Flexible pricing model

4. A wide array of services and features

5. Extensive documentation

6. Huge customer base

7. Availability of case studies

8. Highly Secure environment

9. Freedom to implement monitoring systems from day one

10. Favorite Cloud Vendor for start-ups

Now, let me explain a bit more about them, though these all points can have their own dedicated articles, I will write about them as and when someone asks me to write my own views on them.

1. Free tier to test the interface and basic functionality

As a beginner, you want to see how a technology works, how it can benefit you, whether it suits your business model. Like everyone, I too see any new technology with suspicion, and I don’t want to spend my money just to juggle around some options and configuration changes.

So, AWS listen to you, they have provided a free tier account which you can use for entire one year, where you will get compute, storage, DB services and several other services, free of cost for certain configurations and space.

What are you waiting for? Are you waiting for me to tell you to go and test your ideas?

Also, Read - AWS salary for various AWS certification

2. Accessibility

AWS is for everyone, I mentioned this in one of my article published very recently on scholarhat website. It doesn’t matter whether you are a seasoned IT professional or totally new to this space, whether you are a Developer or System admin, an IT support staff, or some heavy duty Operations manager, a Tech. Director, a CTO, a CEO of a new Start-up, it doesn’t matter, AWS is accessible to everyone in a way which suits everybody expertise.

SDK

If you are a developer, there are various AWS SDKs available supporting the programming language in which you are comfortable or love to Code. AWS offers you an option of using Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Browser, Go, C++. This is also possible using REST API.AWS Mobile SDKs are also available.

CLI

If you are a system/network admin who loves to automate tasks using scripts, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) should be the tool of choice for you. AWS CLI is a unified tool that can be used for AWS Cloud Services Management.

AWS Management Console

A console can be used to administer the entire AWS Cloud environment with equal competence and see things in a more user-friendly way. AWS Management Console is also used by managers sitting at every stratum of organizations to keep an eye on permissions, access rights/logs, the budget of AWS, and expenditure on various AWS resources.

3. Flexible pricing model

You want to test your application/business ideas on various scales, AWS gives you a very flexible and consumer-friendly pricing model, where you pay for resources which you use and for the amount of time you consume that particular resource. Even there, you have the liberty to scale different AWS Cloud resources as per your requirement. There is no commitment, limit, minimum kind of stuff on AWS, this I believe the single most reason, by using which AWS able to attract a huge number of start-ups to its platform across The Globe.

4. A wide array of services and features

3000+, yes you are reading it correctly, in total there are three thousand and plus services/features to support and cater the need of a variety of businesses, disruptive ideas you have in your mind. Moreover, the AWS team is so agile, that many times on Customer’s feedback, they have rolled out a number of features and services in no time.

5. Extensive documentation

The extensive documentation is available for every single service and feature, so whenever you need assistance or have doubt, you can go through them and set up the things in the manner you want.

A robust support system is available with limited free support, and extensive support with paid plans, for the case where you are responsible for your entire organizations cloud infrastructure. AWS team available for support is always very efficient and ready to provide you a first-hand resolution of the issues. In my own experience, I never found them confused or otherwise. Their solutions are to the point and in the maximum cases provide immediate resolution, no matter what query you are bringing in.

6. Huge customer base

AWS touched a million customer mark in 2014 itself, so you can wonder what the current number is running at. AWS customers are final year CS students, IT professionals, start-ups, and big enterprises. Due to a very large number of users, you can get the benefit of Economies of Scale.

7. Availability of case studies

As a fresher in cloud field, you would be curious to know, what all you can do with these many services/features in hand or you want to know how some successful start-ups able to achieve what they have actually achieved. They used these very same services which appears just a small piece of the big puzzle to you.

This is exactly where AWS Customer Success Stories will help you.

There are so many case studies available, which you can use as a blueprint to give your Idea a solid ground. You can probably use case-study as a template and create something of your own, which might actually be even better than those, whose templates you have used.

I want to quote Pablo Picasso’s famous but controversial statement.

Good artists copy; great artists steal. ….Pablo Picasso

8. Highly Secure environment

One major concern for a Cloud Newbie is a fear of Information security, whether data hosted on a cloud is safe or not. What if my hosted DB goes down, from where I can recover my data?

I will answer you, AWS works on Shared Responsibility Model, where Security OF the Cloud i.e. Physical, hardware, the health of cloud are some areas where AWS is having an end to end responsibility but Security IN the Cloud is the Customer’s responsibility.

What if, you left any port open, leading to data manipulations in your critical DBs? These are some scenarios which exist even in traditional IT infrastructure, but the difference is, in the traditional environment, apart from system’s layer of security, you/your company also responsible for tangible resources too ( Physical, hardware, cables, cooling etc.).

Therefore it is needed that once you take the decision to host your environment on AWS cloud, you need to take care of the egress/ingress of traffic, from time to time you need to scan to check for any unattended port or backdoors left in the code. You cannot blame your cloud vendor if you are not careful enough about your application/service security.

AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) is fully managed service, where a replica of your DBs get created in different AZs to address your concerns of High Availability or Fault Tolerance, but cross-region replication is something which you need to do proactively.

9. Freedom to implement monitoring system from day one

Free tier account for a complete year is definitely an attractive option to invite someone to try/test their product, but what if at a later stage you find that some of the production level services are actually payable. I mean so what, won’t you go ahead and test your million dollar idea, which gives your organization/ employer a bit extra in this highly competitive world?

Definitely, you should try, but you also don’t want to burn a hole in your very own pocket. This is where you can put a highly robust and detail oriented monitoring system in place.

You can configure billing alarms to notify you if in case you are about to breach the set limit. It gives you an important edge when it comes to testing new service/application with free mind without compromising the monthly budget that you have set aside.

You can put monitoring system for your virtual servers, your storage, DB disks, Network, I/O, memory utilization and what not.

You won’t believe if I tell you, there are some companies who have created businesses out of the services which are in direct competition to AWS native services when it comes to monitoring the AWS resources and they have hosted the very same service/application on AWS Cloud itself. I mean HOW COOL IS THAT?

Offcourse those third-party applications have a better GUI than AWS native service in question but I am not going into details of that.

In short, AWS gives you peace of mind whether in terms of budgeting or performance monitoring, which is very much crucial.

10. AWS is a favorite Cloud Vendor for start-ups.

Once you go through the case studies page which I shared earlier, you will realize that how many start-ups have actually leverage AWS services and today they are challenging the status-quo in a variety of businesses.

What does it tell you? It tells you that, AWS has allowed Innovators and Leaders to also become risk takers. With almost insignificant capital investment AWS has given you an opportunity to actually work your idea, become profitable, then expand your business, and then go for a kill.

Your mind can never be tied down, and with AWS in picture neither your hands anymore.

Bring an Idea, create something out of it, test it, deploy it, start making a profit out of it and be an owner of a new business entity.

I can only say, In the world of AWS, Sky is the limit for you.

Conclusion

Although I have given you top 10 points according to me, I still count 20 more, but not to convince you to get skilled-up on AWS, but to stress upon this fact that,

CLOUD IS NEW NORMAL, IGNORE IT AT YOU OWN PERIL

Getting skilled-up on AWS Cloud in 2024 is actually a necessity, not an option.

Tomorrow, integration of more and more automation tools and techniques may actually leave many without jobs, therefore get into the groove before hiring touches a plateau, which eventually going to happen in the next 1-1.5 years of Cloud businesses.

The more delayed start you take, the more you need to sweat in next couple of years for the same piece of pie and mind you India is already late when it comes to skilling-up its major workforce for cloud era which has started in 2006 by AWS.

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