Short answer: it's the biggest with 30% of the cloud infrastructure service provider at the end of Q4 2024 compared to 21% and 12% for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, respectively (see Amazon and Microsoft Stay Ahead in Global Cloud Market).

Longer answer: its clear and focused certification paths and the large number of affordable sources to learn for each path were huge draws. Sure, I could muddle through on my own to figure things out in a haphazard way. But, with resources like The Cloud Resume Challenge (TCRC) that give a list of requirements not unlike the kinds of things you encounter in the professional world, it seemed like a natural choice.

Visiting TCRC's site, you would rightly retort with the fact that they also include requirements lists for Azure and GCP. So again, why AWS?

You might be

In February 2025, I had my theanswertolifetheuniverseandeverything birthday. Instead of, 'What do I want to be when I grow up?' that I usually ask as a joke, this time I asked myself, 'Am I doing what I wanted to do when I grew up?' (Keeping in mind that, for my first career choice opportunity at Kindergarten Graduation, the only option left to me was Cheerleader because they responded 'girls can't do that' when I chose Firefighter, and that my next longest aspiration was to be a famous novelist a la Stephen King or Dean Koontz.)

My thoughts were fraught for the next few weeks. I was still happy working in data integration, but did I want to spend the rest of my life in IT--assuming my generation and beyond of Americans will have the privelege of TRUE retirement--configuring middleware ETL tools like Informatica Cloud and writing basic data transformation and cleansing using multiple flavors of SQL daily?

The answer kept coming back YES!...and No.

Why?

Becau