There are three major clouds, and all of them are valid. So, why does this book choose AWS as a starting point? It’s not by chance or because it’s trendy. There are very practical and career-oriented reasons. Let’s take a look at them.

AWS is the provider with the largest market share and the most widely used in the world. This has direct consequences for you:

• More companies use it → more job opportunities.
• Higher demand for professionals → better salaries and more offers.
• More real projects where you can apply what you learn.

If you’re only going to learn one cloud to start with, statistically AWS is the one that opens the most doors.

AWS was the first (2006) and has had more time to refine its services. This means:

• The widest service catalog: there’s a service for almost any need.
• Very proven and stable services, used by huge companies.
• Features that other providers sometimes copy later.

Learning on the most complete platform gives you a panoramic view of what the cloud can do.

When you’re learning something new, finding answers is key. With AWS you have:

• Huge, detailed official documentation.
• Millions of tutorials, videos, courses, and articles.
• A gigantic community: almost any problem you have, someone has already solved it and published the solution.
• Tons of answered questions on forums like Stack Overflow.

Practical example: If you get stuck with an error in AWS, a Google search almost always leads you to the solution. With smaller providers, sometimes you’re more on your own.

This is perhaps the most important reason for a beginner: what you learn in AWS is useful for Azure and GCP.

The three clouds share the same fundamental concepts:

• Virtual servers.
• Object storage.
• Virtual networks.
• Identity and permissions management.
• Managed databases.

Only the names and some details change. Once you understand the why of things in AWS, mentally migrating to another cloud is much easier. We’ll dive deeper into this in subchapter 2.3.

Analogy: It’s like learning to drive. You learn with a specific car, but once you know how to drive, you can handle almost any car even if the buttons are in different places.

This book combines AWS with Terraform (the Infrastructure as Code tool we’ll see in Part III). AWS is by far the best supported provider by Terraform: it has the most complete and mature provider, and most Terraform examples, modules, and tutorials use AWS. Learning both together is a highly sought-after combination in the market.

No. Azure and GCP are excellent and, depending on the context, may be the best option:

• If your company lives in the Microsoft ecosystem, Azure may be a better fit.
• If your work is in data and machine learning, GCP shines.

Choosing AWS to learn doesn’t mean it’s superior, but that it’s the best starting point: the most in demand, the best documented, and the one that best prepares you to understand any cloud.

• We learn AWS first because it’s the market leader (more jobs), the most mature and complete, and has the best documentation and community.
• Concepts transfer: mastering AWS makes it easier to learn Azure or GCP later.
• AWS fits perfectly with Terraform, the other major tool in this book.
• Choosing AWS to start doesn’t mean it’s “better” than the others, just that it’s the best springboard.

In the next subchapter, we’ll see which concepts are universal among providers, so your learning is useful no matter which cloud you use tomorrow.