Thread by @QuinnyPig

An anonymous question has arisen! "My company is looking to migrate to @awscloud. They want someone to help with the project management side, but the role states 'familiar with AWS.' I'm not; what do I need to learn?"

A thread...

First, understand that AWS isn't a distinct product. It's well over 200 products. *Nobody*, including AWS employees, is deeply familiar with all of them.

From a project management perspective, you should be familiar with the Big Services.

Let's go through them.

EC2: virtual machines (called instances) that can run any software you care to shove into them.

This is the baseline service that virtually everyone uses. The engineering is deep, but you won't need it.

It serves as a MAJORITY of the entire AWS global spend, in my estimation.

S3: This is what's known as an object store. It's storage. "Put a file or files into S3, it keeps them for you. Retrieve them at any time."

It can store more data than you will ever be able to afford. There are no capacity limits here, and pricing is linear.

RDS: Managed database offerings. MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and a few others. They run it for you so you don't have to handle with a lot of the administrative bits. Some folks migrate to EC2 when they need more control.

Lambda is the New Hotness and is part of the "Serverless Revolution." You write code, AWS executes it for you when certain conditions are met, like "the passage of time," "a file shows up," "a user clicks a button," etc.

All of the above and more live in "AWS Regions." These are vast collections of many data centers in various locations.

Inside of each region there are multiple "Availability Zones." These are datacenters a few miles apart or so. Great for local disaster planning.

Data transfer is a big bill item, but the nuances are vast and deep. From a project perspective, "we'll dig into specifics" is fine. "Anything can send data anywhere you'd like" is the capability story here.

Billing is generally "you pay for what you use." If you use more resources, you pay more. The golden model of the cloud is that you increase resource usage along with demand (often called auto scaling), then turn it back down as demand wanes.

This is harder than it sounds.

From a baseline PM perspective, this is basically all you need to know in early discussion phases. You can learn the rest as it comes up--the same way the rest of us do.

Lastly, you may notice that there's no snark at all in this thread.

That's because helping people find jobs is something I'm deadly serious about. "Making jokes at the expense of your career trajectories" isn't what I'm about. My DMs are open if I can help.