🔧 I passed 13 AWS certifications. Here's what I actually use at work (and what collects dust).

It was a random Tuesday. No warning, no gradual degradation. RDS just... stopped accepting connections. ECS tasks were crashing in a cascade, CloudWatch alarms were firing, and my Slack was lighting up with "is prod down?" messages from three different people simultaneously.

I didn't open a study guide. I opened CloudWatch Logs, pulled up the VPC...