When I started learning AWS, I had this very simple idea in my head: learn the services, finish the modules, build a few projects, and eventually I’d be “good at cloud.” So I started collecting names — EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, EFS, CloudFront, Route 53, and a growing graveyard of AWS console tabs. 😂 At first, it felt productive because every completed service felt like another box checked. But somewhere during the networking labs, that started falling apart. I realized I could tell you what a NAT Gateway does, but still stop and ask myself, “Wait… why are we creating another subnet for this?”
That question actually changed how I started learning. Instead of asking, “What does this AWS service do?”, I started asking, “What problem are we solving that requires this thing?” Suddenly VPC started making more sense. A route table wasn't just another AWS resource; it was an answer to “Where should this traffic go?” A NAT Gateway wasn't something you create because a tutorial told you to; it existed because a private machine needed controlled outbound internet access without becoming publicly reachable. Even NACLs became interesting when I deliberately broke one and watched an otherwise healthy request just… hang. 💀
And I started noticing the same thing outside networking. IAM isn't really about memorizing policies — it's about deciding who should be allowed to do what, and from where. CloudFront isn't just “AWS CDN” — it's figuring out which responses are safe to reuse, which ones are personalized, and what happens when your cache thinks two requests are the same when they aren't. Docker isn't impressive because you know docker build; it's useful when you understand what should actually live inside a container, what should stay outside it, and how that behaves when the container gets replaced.
I'm still nowhere near the point where I'd call myself a production DevOps engineer. Most of what I'm learning right now comes from courses, labs, breaking things, fixing them, and trying to reason about what these systems would look like in a real environment. And honestly, that's probably been more valuable than simply finishing lectures. Because the more I learn, the more I realize that companies probably don't need someone who can recite 100 AWS services from memory. They need someone who can look at a broken system and ask the right next question.
Maybe that's the difference between learning tools and learning engineering. One teaches you what exists. The other teaches you why it exists, when to use it, and what happens when it breaks.
I'm curious about people who already work in Cloud/DevOps/SRE:
What was the first thing you learned in production that made you realize, “Yeah… courses really didn't prepare me for this”?
