If I were about to get started with AWS in 2026

As an IT professional, I believe that success hinges on embracing a ‘growth mindset‘ and being a lifelong learner. Information technology has evolved significantly over the past two decades, and navigating this ever-changing landscape requires constantly acquiring new skills and mastering new platforms. In this post, I’ll share my tips for I was about to get started with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2026.

What is cloud computing really about?

In a nutshell, Cloud is ‘internet’. You see, the notion of ‘Cloud computing’ fundamentally revolves around delivering various services over the internet, commonly referred to as the “cloud.”

All public cloud providers provide different  ‘services’ via the cloud.  Those include offering a range of services that can be categorized into three primary models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each of these models offers different levels of virtualization and management responsibilities.

• IaaS provides virtualized computing resources over the internet, allowing users to rent virtual machines, storage, and networks.
• PaaS offers a platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and manage applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
• SaaS delivers software applications over the internet, on a subscription basis, eliminating the need for installations and maintenance.

  

Beyond these core models, the cloud landscape also includes specialized services:

Database as a Service (DaaS): Provides database management capabilities without requiring physical hardware or database software installation. Users can store, retrieve, and manage data in the cloud, ensuring high availability and scalability.

Container as a Service (CaaS): Offers a platform for managing and deploying containerized applications. Containers package applications and their dependencies, ensuring consistency across different environments. CaaS simplifies container orchestration and management.

Messaging as a Service (MaaS): Facilitates the exchange of messages between applications or services. It ensures reliable communication, enabling components of an application to interact seamlessly. MaaS supports various messaging patterns, including publish-subscribe and message queuing.

Each of these specialized services addresses specific needs, enhancing the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency of cloud solutions, making it easier for businesses to leverage the full potential of the cloud.

Why dive into the cloud?

My first exposure to AWS was in the course of helping a friend who was starting his business. He had developed a hybrid application using AngularJS and the Ionic framework and wanted to find an elastic, cost-effective solution that offered high performance. After a massive amount of research, he found AWS.

At the time, we were both completely new to the AWS platform. Logging into the AWS console for the first time, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the number of services with abbreviations like S3, EC2, and S53. It felt like another language.

To learn more, I dug into some AWS videos and read my first AWS white paper about the cloud, which really struck a chord with me. As an IT engineer, ensuring that projects are well-architected, flexible, and scalable and that they ensure business continuity, is always the goal. I knew that the cloud could address many of these challenges. This is what encouraged me to start my career in the cloud.

Why don’t get your hands dirty with AWS Free Tier?

I initially created my own AWS account with free tier, even before knowing anything about the platform. The AWS Free Tier includes certain services that are available for 12 months following your AWS registration date. After creating your AWS account, you can use any of the products and services, listed below, for free within certain usage limits.

Within a few weeks, it was clear to me that AWS is a great choice for startups.The pay-as-you-go model has no upfront fees, and you pay more as your business grows. When this happens, the AWS pricing calculator is very helpful in understanding the costs of scaling up.

The AWS Simple Monthly Calculatorhelps customers and prospects estimate their monthly AWS bill. It incorporates the latest pricing changes, including the tiered pricing model for download bandwidth, so that you can optimize your solution.

Tapping into the basics

Truly understand “what is cloud computing?”

“Cloud Computing is a remote virtual pool of on-demand shared resources offering Compute, Storage, and Network services that can be rapidly deployed at scale.”

Compute, Network, Database, and Storage are four the most important components in AWS. These resources allow our application to work in the cloud.

In learning AWS, our first target is to design and implement a well-architected solution for different types of projects by using AWS services.  I strongly recommend that anyone new to the cloud read Amazon’s white paper, Overview of Amazon Web Services. This will help you gain a good understanding of cloud computing, especially the components implemented by AWS.

Get familiar with SPI (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) with real-life examples

SPI is an acronym for the most common cloud computing service models. Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service.

• SaaS applications are designed for end-users, delivered over the web. Examples include Google’s Google Docs, Microsoft’s Office 365 online, etc.

• PaaS is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying those applications quick and efficient.

• IaaS is the hardware and software that powers it all – servers, storage, networks, operating systems, etc. Take a look at the three major platforms

Get Familiar with AI on AWS

If you want to build or scale Artificial Intelligence (AI ) in 2025, you absolutely need to get familiar with AI on AWS. Amazon Web Services has quietly become one of the most comprehensive clouds for AI innovation, offering everything from generative AI APIs to full machine-learning platforms and custom model tooling.

With services like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI, teams can access high-performing foundation models, fine-tune them on their own data, deploy generative workflows, and even build AI agents without managing any infrastructure. AWS isn’t just about models either; its end-to-end stack includes purpose-built AI infrastructure, robust data foundation services, and seamless integration with enterprise systems, making it easier for startups and enterprises alike to move from prototype to production.

In 2025, AWS has also expanded its AI Competency and agentic AI categories, such as Amazon Bedrock AgentCore specialised on serverless AI agent building, helping customers find partners specialized in autonomous systems, growth programs like the Generative AI Accelerator, and built-in tools for responsible, scalable deployment.

Get familiar with major cloud providers

Since cloud computing has rapidly developed, there are numerous cloud providers worldwide. The current leading providers are Amazon Web Services(AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

You’ll want to really understand the concepts—scalability, high availability, disaster recovery, serverless, etc.—that make cloud computing such a powerful service.

Here is a simple example from my own experience. The cloud trend is really about serverless computing. AWS defines serverless as running code without thinking about servers. The component that implements this concept is AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda automatically runs your code without requiring you to provision or manage servers. It really allows engineers to focus on code and not on servers.

How to learn AWS

Have a good understanding of Best Practices in architecting an AWS cloud solution

For this area, I’d like to recommend two great white papers: Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices, published in Feb 2016 and AWS Well-Architected Framework. These are excellent resources that explains how to design a well-architected solution with AWS.

Build your content knowledge

First, delve into industry blogs, forums, and publications to keep up with the latest trends and innovations. Then, participate in webinars, workshops, and conferences to gain insights from experts and peers.

Then utilize online courses and certifications to deepen your understanding of specific topics.

Importantly, engage in hands-on projects to apply theoretical knowledge practically.

Last but not least, regularly reading white papers, case studies, and research reports will also enrich your expertise. By continuously building your content knowledge, you enhance your skills and remain competitive in your field.

Learn by doing

Before you get a real cloud job, you’ll need actual experience working in the platform. I highly recommend the guided, real-world experience on the AWS platform offered by AWS training. Each hands-on lab session provides you with a temporary account and credentials for the AWS console. You can access any related service to complete your lab. It’s just like working in a real environment.

Personally, I have a lot of experience using Cloud Academy labs. I found them to be very qualified, with detailed descriptions for explaining every step. Some new labs also provide working scenarios where you help discover the solution. This type of experience is very important for understanding how to implement your solution and why you should make one choice over another.

Get an AWS certification

After comparing the AWS exams, their range, and the level of difficulty of questions (and by talking with other certificate holders), I recommend starting with the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. The AWS Certified Developer Associate exam is very similar preparation-wise. At the associate level, the most complex exam is the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate, which requires much more preparation compared to the other two exams.

Fortunately, we have various resources via the internet, and Pluralsight and Cloud Academy’s AWS Certifications Prep  Learning paths are great resources to help you succeed. Using Cloud Academy, the quiz sessions are a very useful tool to build your knowledge. Each week, I would choose my weakest area and take at least 30 questions in test mode.

Continuous learning with goals

Keep building your knowledge in the areas that align with your future goals. So, if you’re like me, a software engineer who wants to be a full-stack or DevOps engineer, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and Docker technologies would all bring real value to your current projects.

Learning and Work & Life Balance

If you’re studying and working full-time, balancing it all might be a little tricky. Here are the strategies that have worked for me:

Set your goals

Are you working toward advancing in your career ? or will you be launching a startup or a new business? Establish your short term and long term goals to help guide your learning path.

In my experience, I first completed all of the foundational courses (all of the fundamentals courses at CA), and then modified my course list based on my next goal. For example: if you want to build and administer your environment, I recommend the operations course (Operations on AWS ).

Make studying a daily habit

On a weekly basis, I chose at least one course to complete per week. I tried to complete one medium-difficulty lab every two days, and an easier lab every day. Taking at least one quiz per day is also useful. As I mentioned before, if I detected an area where I was week, I would do at least 30 questions for that topic.

Always keep yourself up to date

For those who are motivated to pass Microsoft Azure or AWS solution architect certification, and especially for the professional level AWS certifications, it’s important to keep your content knowledge up to date with the latest releases and applications.

Getting started with AWS in real life

Finally, find an AWS project that you can work on by creating your own, or finding a real-world project through friends. I helped a friend build his personal website where he could showcase his project portfolio. He needed to find an inexpensive way to host the site and reduce downtime at peak times. This solution would be elastic and flexible to grow with the business.

His website contained many HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. I chose an S3 bucket to host all of his static files and CloudFront to deliver the content.

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates the delivery of your website using client-side technologies (such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and does not require server-side technologies (such as PHP and ASP.NET).

The advantage of this choice is that it ensures that his project will be delivered using a global network of edge locations since his content will be hosted in S3 as an origin server. It will also be well-integrated with other AWS services in the future.

The cloud is not only a trend, it is the future. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will share more of my experiences of diving into the cloud.

Keep your passion, keep learning, you’re worth more than you think . — MelonyQ

Looking forward

The cloud is not only a trend, it is the future. If you’d like to learn how to start learning Microsoft Azure as a beginning, check out this blog post. By the way, if you enjoy similar topics, you can follow me here on Medium or sign up for my newsletter updates, I have lots of content cloud computing and AI to come because I’m really passionate about this topic, and I’m writing weekly to train my tech entrepreneurship muscle! Stay tuned, and see you in the next one!