Ask HN: Gain experience in production-grade infrastructure design?

I am very passionate about Amazon Web Services because it has been my playground for many years to help me learn piece together backend components. I teach an IT infrastructure class relying heavily on EC2/S3/VPC/etc. I am also a grad student and have used these services for one of my own project. At this point, I am contemplating pursuing a career where I can work more on AWS (and scalable architectures in general).

But for that, I need to be able to design and build scalable architecture for applications that are production-grade. I learned this the hard way through an interview recently.

Unfortunately, being a grad student with limited resources and time, I never had the opportunity to build any production-grade application using AWS or any other platform. I have never designed anything that was really distributed in nature (except some redundancy with AutoScaling and Elastic Load Balancing). All my experience is so far limited to some AWS developer guides and some tutorials. I know I can keep digging deeper into those guides but I am confident nothing will teach me better than a real-life project with real hard constraints and demands.

Given my aforementioned career goal, how can I get this extra experience?

Is there anybody here who needs a helping hand (I'm not seeking monetary compensation) with any application on AWS? I'd be willing to put 2-3 hrs/day.

You can reach me at rc53@buffalo.edu or @rogerchucker on Twitter.