ps. I am always looking for episode ideas too, so if you have something you want to learn about, shoot me an email.
> what does aws have to do with devops?
I am not really sure what you are asking, but let me rant a little about devops, and in a round about way hopefully answer your question. Personally, I hate the word DevOps because no one knows what it means. Devops seems to mean different things to different people. If I were to define it, I guess I would say DevOps to me means, you want a hybrid sysadmin who knows how to program enough to work with configuration management, or you want a developer who knows enough about sysadmin bits to keep things stable and secure. If you look at most of the DevOps job postings, you will see they actually want someone who is 80% sysadmin + 20% developer. DevOps kind of seems like BS to me, since to be a good sysadmin, I think you should know how to use configuration management by default, you don't need to be this hybrid position. So, long story short, AWS allows sysadmins or develops to use APIs to manage infrastructure through code. So someone who does "devops" should be able to use AWS. I also think, that if you are devops (whatever the sysadmin/developer ration), and don't know how to use AWS (or other cloud providers), your job prospects are going to look pretty grim (non-existent) 10 years out.
> if you are devops (whatever the sysadmin/developer ration), and don't know how to use AWS (or other cloud providers), your job prospects are going to look pretty grim (non-existent) 10 years out.
I personally think that people who can use AWS are pretty common, and using AWS is only getting easier. If you know how to work with actual, physical hardware, on the other hand (which most people even today don't seem to know how to do), then you're going to be in a much better position, skill-wise, than someone who only knows AWS (which is many people).
It depends on your company but your goal should be to get on the on-call rotation as quickly as possible. Once you are on the on-call rotation, you will take your responsibility even more seriously - as you will be the point person for systems issues.
Similarly, your goal should be to identify a pain area in your systems management and be able to write a script, a Nagios plugin, something to address that pain point. You can work from there to larger projects involving infrastructure automation.
Like with anything, it will help to learn to understand the language of DevOps. The best way to do that is by reading and watching presentations by practitioners.
Similar to iOS Dev Weekly, you can learn a lot by reading a curated list of articles in the DevOps world.
http://www.devopsweekly.com/archive
Surge 2014 (one of the better DevOps conferences) has slides and videos.
If you do have an Operations person, you should be working together on things like how you can improve the deployment process to make it easy for new software to get into production.
If you don't have an Operations person, then you will have to bridge that gap. And that means learning what things make software operable - logging, monitorability, availability, resilience etc.
Web Operations, Continuous Delivery, Release It are three good starting points.
I gave a talk at Devops Days Brisbane on How to Design and Develop Software for Operations. I don't claim it to be complete but it comes from years of experience supporting critical applications
http://willthames.github.io/2014/08/10/devops-days-brisbane-...
You can checkout http://linuxacademy.com/ (I am not affiliated to them in anyway what so ever). During my search for the DevOps training I found their website. They follow a Team Treehouse kind of a model (learn at your own pace) and charge around $25 per month. I haven't tried that myself but their AWS content (All tracks) and DevOps track looks pretty solid.
If you want to get in touch my email address is in my profile. Good Luck !!
There are also local meetups on devops, so attend one and ask for advice or mentoring. If you have a budget, there is probably someone who can help.
Also check out http://devopsbootcamp.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
Plug: I'm in the process of making an online training curriculum if you're interested. The content isn't ready now, but I may be able to do some remote training. Contact info in my profile.