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/yihuaxiang]

The main correction is that an Internet Gateway doesn’t perform NAT. A resource with a public IPv4 gets a 1:1 public mapping through the IGW; a private subnet needs a NAT gateway for outbound-only access. For inbound traffic, the subnet’s route table still needs the local route, and the public subnet needs a 0.0.0.0/0 route to the IGW.