Everything You Need to Know About AWS for Your First Developer Job

A real-world guide for day-one developers

You just landed your first developer job! Congratulations!

You’re excited, proud and already imagining what it’ll be like to finally build things for real, not just for personal projects and experimentation.

Day one comes around, you open your new company laptop, join a few team channels, and begin receiving access to an AWS account, or maybe several.

You notice pipelines you didn’t create, services you recognize by name but not by behavior and permissions you don’t fully understand.

You might even see things like Amazon S3 buckets, AWS Lambda functions, Amazon API Gateway endpoints, Amazon CloudWatch dashboards, and a few AWS IAM roles with names that look like they were created by someone in a hurry.

And that’s when it hits you. You didn’t actually know what to expect.

You want to do well and increase the possibility of ramping up quickly to make a good impression and avoid being the person who breaks something important or feels lost for weeks. You start asking yourself, what should you already know, what should you focus on first, and how do people actually work with AWS day to day.

Don’t worry, I’ve got you! This post is for that moment.

This post is for developers preparing to start their first job working with AWS and trying to figure out how to be ready before and after day one. We’ll go beyond theoretical and lean into what’s practical.

We'll tackle what to understand, what to pay attention to, and what should be running in the back of your mind as you start working inside a real company's AWS environment.

Your first surprise comes quickly

One of the first thing you'll notice is that AWS at your job feels very different from the AWS environment you learned tutorials and built projects in.

A mental shift that helps is realizing you didn’t get hired to “learn AWS” in the abstract. There’s no clean starting point. There's no empty account waiting for you to build the “right” architecture. Instead, you’re stepping into an already existing system that includes, accounts, environments, pipelines, permissions, processes, conventions. All of it built for reasons you don’t fully understand yet.

AWS is vast. There are more than 200 services, which is exciting but as a first time developer, can be annoying at the same time. The good news is that most teams don’t use them all. In day-to-day work, AWS usually shows up in a few main technical areas like compute, storage, networking, security, databases, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, observability, and deployment tooling. If you learn how your team uses those areas, the rest starts to feel manageable.

It’s easy to feel behind here. A lot of new developers assume everyone else knows what’s going on and they’re the only one catching up. That assumption is almost always wrong! What matters early is not how much you know but how well you learn the shape of the system you just joined.

AWS categories you need early

It helps to mentally group AWS into the big categories developers actually work in.

Compute is where code runs. This could be AWS Lambda for serverless functions, Amazon EC2 for virtual machines, or containers on Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS. Storage is where files and artifacts live, usually in Amazon S3. Databases hold application state, commonly stored in Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon RDS. Networking is how services connect and communicate safely, which is where Amazon VPC, subnets, security groups, and load balancers like an Application Load Balancer show up. Security sits across everything through Amazon IAM, AWS KMS, and network boundaries. Observability is how you see what’s happening in your systems in production through services like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray, and audit trails like AWS CloudTrail.

You absolutely do not have to master all of these in week one, you just want enough familiarity to recognize what you’re looking at so you can ask more effective questions.

You're stepping into your company's AWS environment, not a lesson plan

Know that you got hired to work inside a specific AWS environment that already supports real users and real business needs.

Your immediate objective is to understand how things work well enough to change them without causing damage, how code gets deployed, how services talk to each other, how failures are noticed and handled and how access is controlled.

A simple but powerful habit in your first week is getting clarity on where you are. Answer questions like, which AWS account are you in, which region are you in, are you in a development, staging, or production environment.

AWS Regions and Availability Zones matter because they shape latency, resilience, and where resources physically live. If you hear someone say “this is in us-east-1” or “that workload is multi-AZ,” they’re not trying to test your alphanumeric understanding, they're just giving context to where and how resources are deployed.

When I made my own transition into tech from a completely different career, this took time to sink in. Before the cloud, I was a professional athlete. Progress in that career, came from understanding the system you were competing in and improving inside it. AWS turned out to be similar. Once I stopped trying to know everything and started trying to understand the environment I was in, the learning curve flattened out.

Your terminal becomes important very fast

Early on, you’ll probably write less code than you expected. That’s normal!

Most of your first week is about setup. Getting your local environment working the way your team expects. Installing the AWS CLI. Understanding how authentication works at your company. Maybe it’s AWS IAM Identify Center for Single Sign-On (SSO), maybe it’s using temporary credentials through AWS Security Token Service or maybe it’s multiple CLI profiles tied to different accounts.

However it’s done, you want to understand how requests from your laptop become actions in AWS. That clarity makes debugging easier and gives you confidence when something doesn’t work.

The AWS Console is useful, especially when you’re new but the terminal is where most developers spend their time once they’re comfortable. It’s faster, repeatable, and closer to how things actually run in automation.

Permissions are usually the problem

At some point, something will fail in a way that doesn’t make sense. Your code looks right. The resources exist. You'll try it again and receive the same result.

This is usually where permissions enter the picture. Permissions is one of the first debugging steps to check when you’re receiving errors while trying to read or change resources.

Identity and access controls are at the center of AWS, and they trip everyone up early on. A lot of issues aren’t logic errors at all but they’re actually boundaries set that are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. In real environments, you’ll run into IAM roles and policies, resource-based policies like Amazon S3 bucket policies, and sometimes encryption rules enforced through AWS KMS.

Once you start thinking in terms of who is making a request, what they’re allowed to do, and which resource is involved, AWS permissions becomes easier to reason about. Treating IAM as a core skill early, and learning to recognize permission failures will quickly save you a lot of debugging frustration.

Most of what you touch already existed before you arrived

At your new job, you will inherit infrastructure before you will design anything new.

That infrastructure is usually defined as code using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK or Terraform. These tools allow infrastructure to be versioned, reviewed, and deployed like application code. Even if you’re not writing it yet, learning how to read it matters!

You’ll also start noticing where that infrastructure connects to delivery workflows. If your team uses AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild, or even a mix like GitHub Actions plus CloudFormation, then these are the path your developer changes will follow.

Being able to tell what will change before it changes is how teams avoid breaking production. Developers who take the time to understand existing infrastructure build trust quickly because they’re showing respect for the system.

Serverless may force you to change how you think

There’s a good chance your new role involves serverless, and that’s another adjustment.

You will have to pause to stop thinking primarily about servers and start thinking about triggers and events. For example, an API request comes into Amazon API Gateway and invokes an AWS Lambda function, a file upload lands in Amazon S3 and triggers processing, a message arrives in Amazon SQS or Amazon SNS and kicks off work, an event is routed through Amazon EventBridge, a workflow spans multiple steps using AWS Step Functions and an application’s state that lives in Amazon DynamoDB.

This mindset will affects how you write code and how you handle failure. You'll start caring about retries, idempotency, and visibility earlier because distributed systems fail in messy ways. You'll also start thinking about scalability differently because serverless services scale automatically, but they still have limits and concurrency behaviors you need to understand.

Learn how changes reach production before making one

Before you ship anything meaningful, it helps to understand how a change actually makes it to production.

Figure out what starts the deployment process. Learn whether approvals are needed. Understand how environments are separated. Ask what happens when something fails and how rollbacks are handled.

If your team uses AWS CodePipeline, GitHub Actions, GitLab or a Git-based workflow, watch a few deployments go through before you touch anything major. This will be critical to understand because when things go wrong, the calmest developers are usually the ones who understand the delivery system.

Knowing this upfront will keep you from guessing later, and make you calmer when you do ship your first change.

Observe before you optimize

Production systems don’t always announce problems clearly. Logs, metrics, and traces are how you will figure out what’s happening when you’re not watching. In serverless environments especially, they’re your only way to real visibility.

You’ll likely spend time in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Metrics, and in some environments you’ll also use AWS X-Ray for tracing. When someone asks “who changed this,” that’s where AWS CloudTrail becomes useful because it shows all API activity to help you understand what happened.

Spending time early just observing how systems behave helps you build intuition. Over time, you start to recognize what normal looks like, which makes it easier to spot when something isn’t.

Cost will show up sooner than you expect

It’s better to learn this early because contrary to the tutorials you’ve done, developing on AWS at your job is not purely technical. There’s an economic side to operating in the cloud that directly affects your company’s business.

Every decision has a cost attached to it. You don’t need to be perfect about this early on, but you should be aware. Leaving things running, misconfiguring resources, or forgetting to cleanup adds up quickly. In most teams, you’ll use AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, and some will rely on the Cost and Usage Report for deeper reporting. Tagging resources also matters more than people expect because it’s how teams attribute cost to systems and owners.

Developers who pay attention to cost tend to think more carefully about trade-offs, and that mindset shows maturity. It also signals that you understand you’re building for a business, not just for a demo.

Certifications can help if you want structure

You don’t need a certification to be successful in your first AWS developer job. Plenty of great developers never pursue one. That said, certifications can be genuinely useful when you’re feeling overwhelmed and want a structured way to build familiarity with AWS and how things fit together.

The real value is often in the process of studying, not the exam itself. Preparing for an AWS certification forces you to slow down and learn how AWS expects systems to be build and architected well.

During this process, you'll start to see recurring patterns around compute, networking, security, storage, scalability, and fault tolerance. You'll also begin to understand why certain services are paired together and why some designs are preferred over others. That kind of exposure helps you develop better instincts long before you’re asked to design anything on your own on the job.

If you’re early in your journey and want a broad foundation, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner can help you build vocabulary and basic cloud context. It introduces you to core services, shared responsibility, pricing concepts, and the global nature of AWS without going too deep too fast.

If you want to go a level deeper into what you’ll actually see in a developer role, the AWS Certified Developer Associate and the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certifications are a natural next steps.

The AWS Solutions Architect Associate focuses on how systems are designed on AWS as a whole. You spend time thinking about cost efficiency, performance, reliability, and scalability. You learn how different services work together and how architectural decisions affect long-term outcomes. For many, this certification is where AWS stops feeling like a collection of isolated services and starts feeling more cohesive.

Studying for the AWS Developer Associate exposes you to how applications are built and deployed on AWS. It includes topics like serverless development, CI/CD workflows, monitoring, and troubleshooting, which will help you understand how code behaves once it leaves your laptop and runs in AWS.

These certifications are accelerators for learning and will help you stay oriented while you’re building experience, but know that they are not the destination. You can always look into pursuing many other AWS or industry certifications offered but remember, the magic only happens when you apply those concepts on the job, one change, one system and one debug session at a time.

Expectations and what really matters

For your first AWS developer job, you're not expected to be an expert. Early success looks like learning how to operate inside a complex system, asking good questions, making safe changes, understanding impact, and improving steadily.

That approach is what helped me move from a completely different career into cloud development, and it’s what I’ve seen work consistently for others. Your journey of a new developer on AWS will depend on how you take the time to understand the environment you’re working in.

If you do that, you’ll ramp up faster than you think and set yourself up for everything that comes next.

Lastly, if you're looking to dive deeper in your learning journey, explore these FREE AWS resources:

• AWS Free Tier Sign Up
• Complete AWS Developer Learning Plan
• Intro to Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Intro to AWS Billing Services and Cost Management

Good luck!

---

If you've got this far, thanks for reading! I hope it was worthwhile.