Properly done AWS is always infrastructure as code, so learn CDK. Becoming proficient in building services where everything is wired by CDK will basically force

Properly done AWS is always infrastructure as code, so learn CDK. Becoming proficient in building services where everything is wired by CDK will basically force you to understand the operating model of AWS and the building blocks. You essentially have: IAM/Security -> Grant access between services Networking/VPC -> Open interfaces between services Services themselves -> S3/DynamoDB/Lambda From there, you realize everything kinda follows the same pattern, and you can rely on the CDK typescript type system to chain and link things together. From there, focus on microservice architectures, distributed coordination of writes to Dynamo DB from lambdas, when to use containers, etc