Main image of article AWS Cloud Career Path: What are Your Options?

The public cloud world is split between a handful of competitors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and a few others. At the moment, AWS dominates the market for cloud services; if you want to work with the cloud on a daily basis, you need to know the platform’s offerings, nuances, and costs. With that in mind, what does an “ideal” AWS cloud career path look like?

Given the size of AWS, there’s no single career path for the platform. Let’s break down your options!

What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

AWS provides cloud storage and compute to individuals and organizations. From relatively stripped-down beginnings (at least in retrospect), the platform now offers more than two hundred features, from networking and analytics to storage and computing.

For organizations of all sizes (as well as individual developers), AWS offers several key advantages, including scalability and elasticity (you can trust the platform to scale with your cloud needs, provided you have the money) and the ability to process massive amounts of data at high speeds. There are also some downsides, most notably its complexity and (depending on your budget) costs.

Amazon’s share of the cloud infrastructure service provider market stands at 32 percent, according to Statista, putting it well ahead of Microsoft Azure (22 percent), Google Cloud (11 percent), and distant competitors such as Oracle (2 percent) and Tencent Cloud (2 percent). If you’re interested in the cloud as a profession, knowing at least something about most of these platforms can only help your career.

What’s the best way to learn AWS skills?

If you’re totally new to all things AWS, it’s easy to become quickly overwhelmed by all the options available. Fortunately, Amazon has followed in the footsteps of other big tech companies and established a pretty significant Training and Certification hub on the site; for those willing to pay quite a bit for an intensive learning course, there's also the new AWS Cloud Institute. Here are some courses on fundamentals you can take, depending on your anticipated focus and interests:

Those are paired with a number of free “learning plans” designed to provide structured guidance (you’ll need to enroll, first):

Before you get to AWS-specific training, take the time to learn as much as possible about the fundamentals of the cloud itself. During this episode of “Tech Connects” with Kevin Kelly, Director of Cloud Career Training Programs at AWS, we discussed the five core concepts of the cloud:

If you don’t have time to watch that, the concepts are:

  • Compute
  • Storage
  • Network
  • Database
  • Security

For those who want to rely on non-Amazon training modules, there are lots of options available online; start by checking out this Coursera breakdown for an idea of what’s available.

Do I need certifications for an AWS cloud career?

If you’ve mastered many of the core skills of AWS, and perhaps specialized in features such as machine learning, chances are good you won’t need formal certifications to land a job—provided you can demonstrate to your interviewer that you can successfully carry out the role.

That being said, AWS certifications can help you stand out from a crowded field of applicants when competing for a jobs, and they can assure recruiters and hiring managers that you have what it takes. Here are the key AWS certifications you can earn; some are entry-level, while others demand a fair bit of knowledge and experience:

As you progress through your AWS cloud career, you can try to negotiate with your manager for the time and resources necessary to earn successive AWS certifications; during your chat, position those certifications as a way for you to boost your knowledge, thus increasing your total value to the company.

What does an AWS cloud career path look like?

As you might expect given AWS’s size, there are numerous AWS cloud career paths. Here are a few popular ones:

  • AWS Developer: This role requires extensive experience with AWS services, as well as programming languages (including Java and Python) and the principles of cloud computing. In simplest terms, AWS developers build and maintain cloud-based applications using AWS services.

  • AWS Cloud Engineer: Like AWS developers, AWS cloud engineers build and maintain AWS-based applications and infrastructure. They’re often tasked with larger, more complex projects than developers, which means they need to understand how to design and build at scale (and automate the building and maintenance workflows as much as possible).
     
  • AWS Cloud Architect: This role is very strategic; its practitioners are often tasked with architecting their organization’s cloud computing architecture, then overseeing a team to bring that architecture to life. In addition to the engineering and design aspects, they’re also tasked with business-y goals such as aligning with a particular budget. As you might expect, this role can pay more than AWS developer or cloud engineer.

  • AWS Cybersecurity Specialist: If a company relies on AWS for cloud-based data storage, compute and analysis, they’ll likely need a tech professional skilled in how to protect that infrastructure against internal and external attack. This role combines the technical knowledge of an AWS developer with mastery of security vulnerabilities and threats.

  • AWS Machine Learning Engineer: As machine learning and A.I. become increasingly important to companies everywhere, more organizations want tech professionals who can use AWS’s growing collection of A.I. and machine learning tools to create a new generation of “smart” products. This role requires deep knowledge of Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, and more.  

  • AWS DevOps Engineer: DevOps is vital for many organizations, and knowing how to practice the discipline in the context of AWS can make you a particularly valuable employee. Those AWS practitioners who specialize in DevOps should learn CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and Elastic Beanstalk, and how to use those services to accelerate and streamline software and cloud application development.
     
  • AWS Data Engineer: Knowing how to use Amazon’s database options to help data scientists, data analysts, and other specialists within your organization mine datasets for crucial insights is a powerful (and lucrative) skill-set.

Even if you don’t plan on focusing all of your learning time on AWS, understanding its core features can open up lots of opportunities in the cloud space. It can also pay pretty well: A recent edition of Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey pinned the average AWS-related salary at $81,387, notably ahead of Azure ($74,651) and Google Cloud ($73,140). While those numbers may seem low in the context of high-paying tech professions, AWS compensation can climb still higher with experience and specialized skills.