I Learned AWS by Building, AWS Builder Center Did the Rest

I study Computer Science at the Federal University of Goiás and spent some time working with games as a developer and game designer. It was enjoyable, but I was always more interested in the infrastructure behind it all, though concerned with its costs. That's when I discovered FinOps, the discipline where engineering and finance meet.

I knew almost nothing about the topic when I started the FinOps learning path on AWS Skill Builder, taking courses like AWS FinOps Fundamentals and Billing and Cost Management, among others. What caught my attention most was that it treated cost as a problem to be solved, through applied labs and practical examples.

I learned to analyze the bill service by service, think about who spends what, and spot waste before it turned into a surprise on the invoice. That changed my perspective. I stopped looking at the monthly total and started wanting to know what changed and why. To test what I learned, I built a project: an anomaly detector that compares yesterday's spend with the normal spend of each service and alerts when something deviates from the baseline. I used Lambda, Terraform, and Cost Explorer.

One part caught me off guard. When a service doesn't generate charges on a given day, Cost Explorer simply doesn't return data for that day, which messed up calculations without throwing any error. I only realized it because a result looked off. I shared this whole story in my post "Costs Before the Surprise " on AWS Builder Center.

Sharing this experience and exchanging ideas with the community earned me badges, and student verification made each one more worthy. I already have 11 badges. I used the AWS credits that came with the first 7 badges to run my project in a real production environment without fear of the bill. I'm just a few badges away from 21, which unlocks a certification voucher. I also gained one year of Skill Builder Premium, which encouraged me to take more courses and labs on this topic without worrying about costs.

But what surprised me most was the community. I connected with people like me who are learning, as well as professionals already working in FinOps, including members associated with the FinOps Foundation. They read my post and started reaching out. We exchanged many ideas about what I had built, and from those conversations, I landed my first job in the field.

If you are a student and wondering if it's worth it, my answer is yes. The learning path pushes you to build something, and verification removes the cost of trying. Afterwards, write about what you did, because that helps much more than it seems. I started out knowing almost nothing about FinOps, and today I work in the field.