AWS certifications won't make you senior. We will.
Real AWS judgment — the decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip. Written by two engineers who ship production AWS every day.
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The problem
You've shipped on AWS ten times. Defending the choices is the hard part.
Not because you're bad — because nobody teaches this part. Docs list knobs. Certs test trivia. Tutorials assume greenfield. What's missing is the reasoning: which option, why that one, and what it costs you when it turns out wrong.
You pick a database and keep second-guessing it
DynamoDB? Postgres? Aurora? Every tutorial picks for you — none explain why the other option was wrong for your case.
Your bill spikes and you learn from Slack
NAT Gateway egress, CloudWatch ingestion, data transfer between AZs — the traps nobody mentioned until finance forwarded the invoice.
PagerDuty fires, but the fix isn't in the docs
Throttling, cold starts, EventBridge retries — AWS docs describe the knobs, not when to turn them. You learn by breaking prod.
Nobody can tell you if the setup is sound
One account or four? Who's allowed to deploy? Would you even notice it break? Nothing in your team owns those answers.
All four are the same gap: the decision, not the service. That's what we teach — every choice written down with the trade-off it carries, from account layout to the alarm that wakes you at 3am. Here's where to start →
The solution
Three ways in. Start wherever you are.
Free on the newsletter. Self-paced with the books. High-touch in the cohort. Same mental model — different depth.
One 5-min email, every Thursday
One real AWS decision, one cost trap, one war story. Read it on the train and apply it on Monday.
The visual map you wish you'd had
AWS Fundamentals & the CloudWatch Book — infographics, patterns, sample code. Yours forever.
Build one production system, end to end
7 weeks of live calls. We build a real monitoring service together — org and accounts, database, API, compute, async, alarms — and you write down every decision as you make it. Demo day at the end.
Why us
Two engineers. 20+ years on AWS.
We write every newsletter, infographic, and chapter ourselves. Startup speed meets enterprise rigor.
Tobias Schmidt
Cloud Engineer & Educator
Tobi has migrated production workloads for startups and large enterprises. He's fallen into every AWS trap so you don't have to.
Sandro Volpicella
Fullstack Developer & AWS Specialist
Sandro helps startups build scalable, serverless-first architectures. AWS Community Builder and regular speaker at Community Days across Europe.