Have you ever stayed at a hotel chain like Hyatt or Hilton, or at an Airbnb? Have you flown on a United plane or taken a ride in a Lyft? Have you watched a show on Netflix or played a game made by Activision? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions you’ve used Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS is a cloud platform created by Amazon that has over 175 services that function from data centers all over the world. Companies of all industries and sizes use AWS for their products — from tiny startups to enterprise behemoths.

AWS offers innovative tools with low costs and robust security that enable engineers to build out impressive applications without worrying about complicated IT details.

What Cloud Products Does AWS Offer?

With over 175 cloud products available through AWS, it’s impossible to list out all of them while still being succinct.

The most popular AWS products tend to be centered around infrastructure, like computation, storage, and databases. This is because owning warehouses and managing servers is extremely costly when done in-house.

Most companies prefer to outsource this work to a large-scale company that employs IT experts and can offer these services at a lower cost, like Amazon.

But AWS doesn’t only focus on infrastructure. AWS also offers many applications in the cloud that are at the cutting edge of technology, including Virtual Reality, Blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics, and even Machine Learning!

What Do Experts in AWS Do?

An expert in AWS should have a clear knowledge of cloud computing support and architecture. They should be able to use AWS services to create robust, efficient, and secure cloud systems. Since AWS offers so many services, most AWS experts choose one or two areas to specialize in.

Let’s take an AWS Machine Learning Engineer as an example. They will have a foundation of cloud computing with AWS technologies with expertise in machine learning on top of that. Their daily work includes building, training, and deploying machine learning models with any of Amazon’s 25 Machine Learning applications on top of existing AWS frameworks.

Amazon’s Machine Learning applications have a wide range of specializations, from deep learning to recommendation engines and even language translation!

Getting Started with Amazon Web Services

Professionals in Cloud Computing have a median annual salary of $146,000 and job growth has grown 225% since 2015.

If cloud computing is an area of interest for you, then there’s no better time to start your new career journey. Udacity offers a variety of Cloud Computing Nanodegree programs to choose from.

The AWS Machine Learning Scholarship Program

If working in AWS with a specialty in machine learning really sparked your interest, then you’re in luck! Udacity just announced a partnership with Amazon to create the AWS Machine Learning Scholarship Program.

In this scholarship program, students will start with the AWS Machine Learning Foundations course to learn about multiple AWS machine learning tools, including AWS AI Services, AWS DeepLens, AWS DeepRacer, and AWS DeepComposer. Upon completing the course, 325 of the top performers will earn a scholarship to complete the AWS Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree Program.

Enroll by July 31 to be considered for the scholarship and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an AWS Machine Learning Engineer!

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Jennifer Shalamanov
Jennifer Shalamanov
Jennifer is a content writer at Udacity with over 10 years of content creation and marketing communications experience in the tech, e-commerce and online learning spaces. When she’s not working to inform, engage and inspire readers, she’s probably drinking too many lattes and scouring fashion blogs.