Chapter 21. Never the end
Of course not. Even if you were to commit yourself to mastering the 100+ services AWS currently has online, by the time you were half done, there would probably be at least a handful of new ones. And that’s not including the dozens of new service features added each month.
Having said that, if you’ve worked through the entire book—following along with the demos and labs in each chapter on your own AWS account—then you’re not doing too badly. You may still lack the confidence that comes with lots of experience, but lack of experience is a condition with a simple cure. Think problems through carefully, plan ahead, and dive in. Rinse and repeat.
Here are a few ideas about where you might want to go from here.
Even if you won’t be working on AWS deployments every day, it can be useful to stay plugged in. One good way to do that without having to invest an insane amount of time is to subscribe to the AWS Announcements email list. I don’t remember ever getting more than two or three emails a week. It takes only a few seconds to visually scan the list of headlines to see if there’s anything close enough to your interests to justify clicking through to the web page.
Figure 21.1 shows the What’s New at AWS page (https://aws.amazon.com/new), where recent AWS announcements and news are neatly displayed. You never know what will spark the next Great Project Idea or solve a crippling problem.