Every cloud service is compute, storage, or networking wearing a costume. Build the mental models once — VMs, object vs block storage, VPCs, DNS, load balancers, regions and AZs — and 200+ AWS services collapse into three ideas.

Not a religion — a trade-off between control, cost, and cold starts. Lambda when traffic is spiky and the ops budget is zero; containers when you need the runtime, the GPU, or the long-running process.

Identity is the real security perimeter. Principals and policies, roles over users, least privilege, temporary credentials. Let AI draft the policy JSON — auditing the wildcards is your job.

The bill is an architecture document in disguise. Learn the pricing dimensions — compute time, GB-months, requests, egress — and the classic traps: forgotten resources, cross-region traffic, the egress surprise.

From git push to production without heroics. CI/CD to the cloud, blue-green, canary, rolling deploys, health checks — and infrastructure as code so the whole thing is reviewable. AI writes the pipeline YAML; you own the rollback story.