People ask me all the time. What certs should I get? What skills do I need? Where do I even start with Cloud, DevOps, or SRE? It comes from everywhere. Beginners trying to break in, career changers pivoting from other fields, senior engineers looking to fill gaps or pick up something new. For a while I would tell them I’d put together a learning plan for them. And then I wouldn’t. Life gets busy, things slip, and I’d end up feeling guilty about promises I didn’t keep.

Every engineer has their favorites. Not necessarily the most popular services or the ones that show up in every architecture diagram, just the ones that make your day better when you get to work with them. These are mine, right now, in no particular order.

AWS ECS/AWS Fargate

If you’ve ever managed EC2 instances just to run containers, you know the relief that comes with Fargate. No patching the underlying host. No capacity planning headaches. You define your task, point it at your container image, and let AWS handle the rest.