As a full-stack developer, I'm trying to figure out which cloud provider I should use for my side projects to gain the most relevant skills. Looking at , which one has better support for CI/CD and serverless functions for a modern web app? I want to learn the platform that is most likely to be used by the top tech companies in 2024 and 2025 so my skills stay relevant for future job hops.
3 answers
For developers, the choice often comes down to the languages you use. If you are a .NET developer, Azure is a no-brainer because of how well it integrates with Visual Studio and GitHub. However, for almost any other stack—Node, Python, Go—AWS is generally the industry standard. AWS Lambda started the serverless revolution, and their ecosystem for it is still more mature than Azure Functions. From a career perspective, having AWS on your resume is like having a "gold standard" for cloud-native development. That said, Azure DevOps is a fantastic CI/CD tool that many non-Azure companies actually use, so learning that specifically is a great move.
Does AWS offer better free-tier options for developers compared to Azure? I want to experiment without running up a massive bill.
I prefer AWS because the community support is just massive. Whenever I hit a deployment bug, there are ten Stack Overflow threads for AWS and maybe two for Azure.
Rebecca nailed it. The "community tax" is real. Having a massive library of tutorials and community-made modules makes AWS much more efficient for a developer working alone or in a small team.
Larry, AWS has a very famous "Free Tier" for 12 months, but you have to be careful with things like NAT Gateways which can cost money. Azure offers some "always free" services and a $200 credit for the first month. For a long-term side project, AWS is usually more predictable if you stay within the micro-instance limits, but Azure is great for a quick, credit-funded prototype.