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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

OT: Job advice needed (because I think many back-end devs will be here :D)

I'm thinking about going full-stack next year. I have a bit of experience building APIs besides being mainly a front-end developer.

Is going "cloud only" a good idea? I thought about starting with AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB and the Serverless framework.

Are the providers hugely different or is it a good idea to spread out and do some Azure and GCP too?

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That's completely off topic. In fact, the question is so broad that I cannot think of anyplace other than the water cooler or Quora to ask it.

Career advice: Never go "foobar-only". Make an effort to learn "foobar" but understand whatever is one layer below it in the stack. Want to go "cloud-only"? Learn OpenCloud, not AWS.

lol, while complaining you still gave me a decent answer, thanks :)

Of course, we're all here to help each other! Good luck!

It's definitely worthwhile to learn Lambda, S3 and serverless apps but all that stuff can be learned on the job. S3 is especially easy to use for most use-cases and any decent programmer can learn to use it in an hour or two.

However, I would definitely learn a SQL dialect and learn how RDBMSes such as Postgres work (especially what is meant by ACID) as most companies are based around a database. Don't believe the hype - SQL is not dead. Dynamo is a great technology but there are many problems it can't solve for you.

Finally, I personally don't know Azure or GCP so well. Only knowing AWS in-depth hasn't held me back so far. I've used a few of Azure's services but I've never built a serious app on it.

My recommendation is to not really worry about individual technologies and to focus on safely handling and working with data.

Yes.

I learned React and later React-Native. Selling myself as a "mobile consultant" then worked fine, nobody cared "how" I made these mobile apps.

My idea was the same with back-end, learning some framework and start selling myself as "mobile cloud consultant" or something, with the hopes that clients also don't care "how" I create these cloud back-ends.

I know SQL, worked most of my time with RDBMSs, so this wouldn't be big of an issue. As I said I already did a few back-ends, but my focus was on front-end, usability and such.

I just mentioned DynamoDB because I had the impression that it was "the AWS DB", do they offer an SQL service besides Redshift?

Yes, AWS has product called RDS , where you can choose RDBMS such as MySQL, PostgreSQL , Aurora (MySQL compatible database) and so on.

DynamoDB is noSQL database.

I knew that DynamoDB is a noSQL DB, I thought with the noSQL hype and everyone doing MongoDB/RethinkDB back-ends now, they would simply say "In the cloud you have to use this and that's it"

RDS somehow sounded like the Redis service of AWS, hehe.

AWS offers hosted Redis/Memcache via ElastiCache

Yes, they have RDS: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/

It allows you to launch many common database engines, which are managed and backed up by AWS. I've been using it for a few years and for my use-case it's great.

lol, I always had the impression RDS was the AWS Redis :D

Elasticache is the AWS Redis.

Learning your way around cloud services is a great idea, but I would be hesitant about starting with Lambda and Serverless, or doing only that. It's somewhat of a different paradigm, kind of back-end for front-end developers, or at least people who don't want to deal with infrastructure. While that is a great thing, I think there is value in understanding what a more tradition webserver on AWS looks like with an EC2 instance, EBS volumes, AMIs, security groups, load balancer, SSH access, etc.

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