Jack of All Trades, Master of One
Yes, you need to know a lot about a lot of subjects. You need to understand the
full stack of technologies that involve the deployment of an application. How-
ever, give yourself a break and focus on one, maybe two specific technologies
and get good at them. If you’re a Network Administrator, learn and master Vir-
tual Private Clouds (VPCs), Security Groups and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB),
so you become the default member of the team who knows how to route and
secure traffic on AWS. Learn how to write CloudFormation scripts to deploy
and manage security groups, ACLs and NACLs, and plug yourself into the
release process of the product.
If you are a database administrator, learn how to port Oracle to a cloud plat-
form, or, even better, learn how to migrate off Oracle and into Aurora (an AWS
hyperscale database service). There are a lot of companies looking to get out of
their Oracle handcuffs and if you are a specialist in migration off Oracle, you
are literally worth your weight in gold.
The goal is to find a specific technology in the cloud that aligns with your expe-
rience and your interests. You’ll be worth a whole lot more with a niche spe-
cialty than with a broad array of technologies and no depth in any.
The Full Stack
The Full Stack is a term that seemed to find its way into the IT nomenclature
several years ago and has died and been resurrected several times over the
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