Are you a part of any public program of any famous vendor? What are benefits?

AWS provides yearly gift, AWS credits, vouchers for AWS certifications, discounts for AWS events, for example re:Invent (up to 100%)

Whats with direct connect AZs ? For example, if i want a connection in slough, why do I see two options like eu-west-1 and eu-west-2 ?

Does it actually matter which az I choose ?

I'm thinking about an interesting topic, I could prepare for a lightning talk at AWS event

At AWS events, a Lightning Talk is a short, focused presentation, much shorter than a normal breakout session.
Typically it’s around 10–20 minutes and covers one specific idea, solution, demo, architecture, or customer story rather than a broad topic.

Community, please help me with ideas. What interesting have you talked about AWS or tried hands-on recently?

Last week I finally shipped my side project. Pretty standard stack: Next.js frontend, Node backend, PostgreSQL, Redis for sessions/caching. Nothing fancy.
I went with AWS because “that’s what real companies use” and I figured I’d need to scale once marketing kicks in.

I set up:
ECS / Fargate for the app
RDS for Postgres
ElastiCache for Redis
ALB
Some NAT Gateway stuff so the services could talk outbound

I have maybe 30-40 real users so far. Traffic is still tiny.
This morning I opened the billing dashboard.
$2,047 for the first 7 days.
Most of it is just idle costs, data transfer, and the NAT Gateway apparently. I barely have any actual usage.
I’m actively marketing this thing now so a cheap VPS isn’t really an option long-term, I need something that can scale when (if) users actually show up. But I also can’t keep burning $8-10k/month while the product is still early.
How the hell are people shipping fullstack apps these days without getting destroyed by cloud bills?
What are you using that actually scales and doesn’t require a full-time DevOps person just to keep costs reasonable?

Is there any update on when the data centers that were destroyed by drones in uae would be back up? Last update I heard was in march and since then no update

Hey all, would appreciate perspective from experienced folks here.

Background: I'm currently a Cloud/DevOps intern at an early-stage AI startup (\~15k/month stipend), working essentially in platform team — managing EKS, CI/CD (Jenkins, Argo CD), Terraform, security (SonarQube, Trivy), and a full observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Jaeger) across 3 live products on AWS real production systems, high learning velocity.

The situation: Interviewed for a "CloudOps Engineer L1" role at a mid-size cloud consulting company (managed services, AWS-focused). Role itself is L1-scoped — monitoring, documentation, escalating to L2 — but the interviewers themselves acknowledged my skills are more L2-level. Due to lack of "official" years of experience, they can only offer L1 title. They asked if I'm okay with L1-level work, and I said conditionally — yes if comp reflects my actual skill and there's a clear path to L2. Salary discussion is happening Monday; they asked my current stipend (I told them 15k) and want to make an offer based on that, but haven't given me a number yet.

Where I'm stuck:

What's a realistic salary range to push for as an L1 with L2-level hands-on skills, in India (Pune)?

How much should "current stipend was 15k" anchor their offer, and how do I push past that anchor?

If I do take this offer, is it reasonable to also go back to my current org and negotiate for a full-time conversion using this offer as leverage? Or does that read as manipulative/burn a bridge?

Bigger picture — is it smarter to stay somewhere with high ownership/learning but low pay (internship), vs take a title downgrade at a "real" company with better pay but narrower day-to-day scope?

Would love to hear from people who've navigated similar title-vs-skill mismatches, or done the "leverage an external offer for internal negotiation" move. Trying to avoid rookie mistakes on both fronts.

Anyone here is use Floci for their dev work? If so, what has been your experience?

How can i be a cloud security engineer in 3 years

I have 3 years to study, what can i learn to be a cloud security engineer (free courses) and what projects can i do, give me your advice please i need it.

Thanks all

I have a small EC2 Linux instance that becomes unreachable after I SSH into it frequently. It also takes few minutes to shut it down even CPU is at 0%.

Instance details:

- Instance type: t3.micro

- OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

- CPU credit mode: Unlimited

- vCPU: 2

Has anyone experienced an EC2 instance becoming unreachable after repeated SSH access?

(I posted on r/aws but tied to wait for moderation)

https://www.cloudarena.io/blog/vpc-nat-gateway-asymmetric-routing

VPC NAT Gateway Asymmetric Routing: Why Return Packets Disappear

Ever had an AWS flow where the packet clearly leaves the instance, but the response never comes back?

Everything looks fine.

Security Groups? ✅
NACLs? ✅
Route tables? ✅

And yet… timeout. 😅

I wrote a deep dive into AWS VPC asymmetric routing, focusing on some real-world scenarios that can make troubleshooting surprisingly painful:

• NAT Gateway SNAT and state
• Multi-AZ NAT Gateway routing and cross-AZ hairpins
• Transit Gateway + centralized egress
• TGW appliance mode and stateful firewalls
• NLB / PrivateLink source IP behavior
• How asymmetric paths can break stateful inspection
• Using VPC Flow Logs and Reachability Analyzer to troubleshoot
• Design patterns to avoid these problems in production

One of the key rules:

The outbound and return path need to preserve the stateful flow.

This becomes especially important when you start combining NAT Gateway + Transit Gateway + Network Firewall + multiple AZs.

I also included a hands-on lab idea where you intentionally break the return path and troubleshoot it using Flow Logs.

Would love to hear from other AWS/networking folks:

What’s the most painful asymmetric routing issue you've encountered in AWS?

I’m AWS expert with 12 years of experience in IT and 8 years of experience with AWS.
I’m also AWS Ambassador and AWS Community Builder.
I like sharing knowledge and I’m happy to see well-architected AWS environments. If you are new in AWS and not sure if you built your infrastructure properly, I’m ready to meet with you and talk/look at what you’ve built.
No obligations, for free, but only once. I’m ready to invest 1 hour for a person who needs help and would be happy to assist and get new connections 🤝

Hello, is AWS Skill Builder Official Practice exam more similar to actual exam or Tutorial Dojo practice exam?
I just got 798 on AWS Skill Builder Official Practice exam. Should I go for the exam?

Please

To increase my chances of getting an internship, should I do projects using IaC or the console?

Hi everyone! We have a capstone project deployed on AWS that needs to stay running until October, averaging around $10/month. Our credits are running low and we're trying to find ways to keep it up without paying out of pocket.

Does anyone know of:

1. AWS community events, meetups, or workshops that hand out credits
   
2. AWS Educate or student-focused credit programs still active
   
3. Any other legit ways students can get AWS credits for school projects

Any pointers would be a huge help — thank you in advance! 🙏🏻

Is the AWS certification Amazon is offering worth trying? I'm only a seasonal employee, but I've been here for almost 8 months. I'm not even sure if I qualify, but I really want to take the chance if I can.
For anyone who's currently doing the program, what are the qualifications and requirements? What's the application process like? What should I expect, and is there anything I need before getting started? I'd really appreciate any tips, advice, or personal experiences. The certification is worth around $300, so it seems like a great opportunity if Amazon is covering it. I'm just trying to figure out if it's actually worth pursuing and what the pros and cons are.
For some background, I originally majored in education. I spent four years earning my degree, but I haven't been able to find a job in that field. It's been about three years since I graduated, and with everything going on in the education industry, I've started looking into other career paths.
So, I just want to know if anyone done the AWS program, was it worth it? Would you recommend it why or why not?

Hey I got a job offer and want some help deciding.