You would be surprised. Most companies I work with are operating on only 1-3 machines, and using the CloudFront infrastructure to distribute content to edge loc

You would be surprised. Most companies I work with are operating on only 1-3 machines, and using the CloudFront infrastructure to distribute content to edge locations around the world. They a handful of Lambda functions to trigger various random tasks like backups, notifications, git pulls, deploys, etc. Oh and S3... tons of S3 storage. I have a client that does $50M a year on a SAAS product using only two EC2 isntances, but 1 of those instances is a developer/beta/test server. Only 1 is used to manage sales across the entire world. They rely heavily on Lambda and SNS & SQS as well. Another client operates eCommerce at around $80M a year revenue using 3 EC2 instances. One of those is a test/dev server and the other 2 are used to distribute load and for redundancy with a load balancer sitting on top. I have 2 other companies that are smaller that generates about $2M and $5M a year respectively that both run a static site hosted on S3, using Lambda for deploys and cloudfront for distribution like mentioned above. Point being, you would be surprised how low key many company's AWS deployments are. --- If I could pin one skill that will stand you head and shoulders above the rest among cloud architects, it is to learn Serverless functions. In this AWS world this is "Lambda". Microsoft calls it "Azure Functions" and Google Cloud Platform calls it "Cloud Functions". If you can write serverless functions AND are AWS certified, that seems to be the hottest thing that I have seen.