We found out that 'how to start cloud computing' is a burning issue from our meetup BelfAWSt. And it is a community Meetup in Belfast, to talk about all things AWS!

• How do you set up your account?
• And how do you learn?
• Or build your career?
• Who do you reach out to?
• And when you are more familiar with the basics, what can you leverage to build higher order systems and solutions?

Questions on certifications came up a lot.

• Are they valuable?
• What workshops can guide me through the Getting Started phase?
• How do you become part of the community to help me and my organisation?

It is daunting when you look up aws.com and there is an ocean of stuff on the website. If you sign up, pick something relatively straightforward and follow a quick lab. I also have used A Cloud Guru.  More recently, 'Skill Builder' has become freely available. Udemy courses are really good.  And other Cloud Providers have similar educational materials. I really like the foundational white papers. There's four or five core white papers that are worth reading. If you attempt a certification, and you read those white papers, it's still beneficial. The PDFs are free and you can download them.

But real learning happens when you go and do something. Get into a workshop. Go and follow an AWS workshop or whatever cloud provider workshop applies to you. The developer advocates and AWS have been great at codifying their getting started workshops. Workshops that were only available at re:Invent/conferences are now freely available on AWS.workshops.

The last thing is the whole idea of patterns. Matt Coulter has CDK Patterns and CDK Day.  SAM has a bunch of patterns. And there's the Serverlessland.com site. When you codify an architectural pattern, like a CDK pattern, it's a great way to accelerate and get something up and running.
Patterns:

Community:
https://aws.amazon.com/developer/comm...
https://aws.amazon.com/developer/comm...
Other:

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube