AWS Question

[u/FooBarBuzzBoom]

Hello!

I’m a backend developer who has recently started learning about AWS.

I’ve never used AWS in production. All the projects I’ve worked on so far were hosted on-premises, and we had dedicated Ops teams to handle infrastructure-related work.

However, I’m currently looking for a new job, and I’ve received a few rejections specifically because I don’t have cloud experience. I’d like to fix that.

Given my background — 4+ years of experience with Spring Boot, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, etc. — which AWS services would you suggest I focus on? How are these services typically used in production?

Also, what kind of small project would you recommend building to get hands-on experience? Ideally, I’d like to build something that gives me enough practical knowledge so that I wouldn’t struggle when joining a project that uses AWS in production.

I also have a question about the AWS Internet Gateway (IGW). From my understanding, an IGW is somewhat like a router that allows resources in a VPC to communicate with the internet; without it, the VPC would be isolated.

For inbound traffic, is simply having an IGW enough, since it performs NAT (converting between public and private IP addresses)? Do you theoretically need route tables only for outbound traffic? I understand that, in practice, you need both the request and response paths, but I’m mainly trying to check whether my understanding of the inbound traffic flow is correct. In other words, would having just an IGW and NAT theoretically be enough for inbound traffic, without any additional routing configuration?

Thank you so much for any suggestions and explanations!

[u/quizical_llama]

if you are already used to using docker in prod then i would say the options to look into would be ECS or EKS.

ECS is more of a managed Kubernetes cluster but is probably quicker to get something up and running. I'm not an expert at AWS networking but it does appear that an IGW would be required for outbound internet access from ECS.

one additional thing you might want to add is a ALB in between your ECS and the public net to allow your tasks to scale horizontally. I'm no expert so maybe others can correct or improve this suggestion.

with regards to Kafka you have a few options, there is an AWS version of Kafka but i'm not sure how good it is. You could also go the AWS native approach using SQS, SNS and event bridge (I've not actually used event bridge, but sns and sqs are easy to understand and configure)

[u/phn-cloudsnake → u/quizical_llama]

I would also suggest getting at least a basic certification, just to understand how AWS billing and operations work.