People ask me all the time. What certs should I get? What skills do I need? Where do I even start with Cloud, DevOps, or SRE? It comes from everywhere. Beginners trying to break in, career changers pivoting from other fields, senior engineers looking to fill gaps or pick up something new. For a while I would tell them I’d put together a learning plan for them. And then I wouldn’t. Life gets busy, things slip, and I’d end up feeling guilty about promises I didn’t keep.

If you’ve been paying attention to the AI space, you’ve probably seen Claude Code pop up. It’s Anthropic’s CLI tool that lets you use Claude directly in your terminal to write code, debug issues, and interact with your codebase. It’s like having a senior engineer sitting next to you, except it doesn’t steal your lunch from the fridge.

Look, I know there are probably a million blog posts about Claude Code and Bedrock at this point. I’m not here to write the definitive guide. I just want to share how I’m actually using it as an SRE who lives in AWS every day, and why the Bedrock piece specifically matters for folks like us.

Every engineer has their favorites. Not necessarily the most popular services or the ones that show up in every architecture diagram, just the ones that make your day better when you get to work with them. These are mine, right now, in no particular order.

AWS ECS/AWS Fargate

If you’ve ever managed EC2 instances just to run containers, you know the relief that comes with Fargate. No patching the underlying host. No capacity planning headaches. You define your task, point it at your container image, and let AWS handle the rest.

Hi, my name is Samuel Tillman, but you can call me Sam. I’m an IT Professional currently working as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer for the National Basketball Association. I spend most of my days waist deep in AWS infrastructure, Terraform, and whatever else is needed to keep systems running. I’ve been doing this tech thing for a while, so you you’d think maintaining a blog would be easy.

It ain’t…