TL;DR This is not a brain dump or a “how-to-pass exam X” post. There are plenty of those elsewhere already. A little over a year ago (last August, to be exact), I unknowingly forked my career path. You may be asking how is that I came to cause such a major divergence while yet remaining unaware as to the fact that I had done so. The answer is both very simple and quite complicated: I got my first AWS certification.
Since I moved back in April, my server has been offline, and with it my old Wordpress-based blog. With my new home, there isn’t really anywhere convenient to run a noisy 1U server blade. This got me thinking about whether or not the server was really essential – of course I still wanted to host my blog somewhere, as well as some other services that I really like having hosted in-house: my own personal Seafile server and email among them.