school. You must move beyond the fear and anxiety of the unknown, and look
to how you are going to acquire the skills necessary to make "The Big Leap."
The key skill you must have is the ability to learn, which means you must first
admit that you do not know a skill. Your openness to new technologies, pro-
cesses and, yes, people skills, are your key to advancement in this new era of
computing. Whether you are in the data center or the management suite, your
ability to pivot is more critical than ever.
Fitting into the Full Stack Team and finding your seat on the Full Stack bus is
the primary goal. Don’t try to be everything to everybody. The Full Stack Devel-
oper or Engineer is typically a unicorn. Specialize in a domain, and go deep into
the topic. Moreover, learn what the team needs, and align that need with your
background and interests. Raise your hand for the S3 bucket and EBS manage-
ment if you’re a storage expert. These are aligned, and you should make the
leap pretty easily.
The real challenge ahead is deciding where to apply your efforts. Cloud tech-
nologies are complex, and an ever-changing matrix of services that are moving
at an astonishing rate from all three big cloud providers. For example, figure 2
outlines some of the 1,000+ new services or new service features introduced by
AWS just in 2017.
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