33 posts tagged with "AWS"

You've decided to learn AWS. You've opened the AWS console, stared at 200+ services, and immediately felt overwhelmed. That's normal — AWS is massive. But here's the thing: you don't need to learn all 200 services. You need about 30 core services to be genuinely dangerous, and you can learn them in a structured 6-month plan. This roadmap gives you weekly goals, monthly checkpoints, certification guidance, and hands-on labs that build on each other.

Walking into an AWS interview without preparation is like deploying to production without testing — technically possible, but you're going to have a bad time. These 50 questions cover the breadth of what interviewers actually ask, organized from fundamentals to architecture-level thinking. Each answer is concise and focused on what matters — the concept, the "why," and the key commands or configurations you should know.

Your application works fine with 100 users. At 10,000 users, pages load slowly. At 100,000 users, the database falls over. Performance at scale isn't about buying bigger instances — it's about putting data closer to users, caching aggressively, and removing bottlenecks at every layer. AWS has purpose-built services for each layer of the stack, and knowing when to use which one is what separates a system that scales gracefully from one that catches fire.

Your company started with one AWS account. Then someone needed a dev environment, so you made a second. Then staging. Then a sandbox for the data team. Now you have twelve accounts, each with different IAM policies, no consistent logging, and a security audit that makes everyone nervous. A landing zone is the fix — it's the foundational structure that makes multi-account AWS actually manageable instead of chaotic.

Your organization decided to standardize on Terraform. Great choice. But you have 200 CloudFormation stacks in AWS and 150 ARM template deployments in Azure that are running production workloads right now. You cannot delete them and start over. You need a migration strategy that moves infrastructure under Terraform management without downtime, without recreating resources, and with a rollback plan if things go sideways.

Every DevOps engineer on AWS eventually faces this question: Terraform or CloudFormation? Both define infrastructure as code. Both create the same resources. But they think about the problem differently, and that difference changes how your team works, how you handle state, and how portable your skills become. After running both in production for years, here's an honest comparison — not a fanboy argument.