What does an AWS Devop do?

An AWS devop is an IT specialist who knows and can use the options and implementations of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. A devop takes a holistic approach to applications and infrastructure:

• Systems thinking: Avoid focusing on only one piece (application or infrastructure).
• Feedback: Keeping production healthy is everyone’s job.
• Continual experimentation and learning with the system.

For historical reasons, an AWS devop comes from either system administration or the developer side. An AWS devop makes sure that applications are provided with high availability. In particular, this also includes systems that should not be publicly accessible on the Internet at all.

Ideally, highly available web applications survive a number of scenarios, such as

• Flooding of servers through DDoS attacks on OSI layers 3, 4 and 7
• Fast loading times thanks to content distribution
• Reliability through redundant systems
• etc.

“AWS is a thing for admins,” I sometimes hear from people who work in marketing. There is nothing wrong with this statement, but it is incomplete. If you are familiar with AWS, you know that AWS now has more than 1,000 cloud services, and many of them are particularly relevant for developers. In 2020, applications should be provided by the part of the organization that is also responsible for keeping them running. And that also includes making them available on the Internet. Large tech companies like Google or AWS itself work this way, and thanks to systems like the AWS Cloud and Docker, so do smaller companies.