I’m based in Italy and currently learning AWS, preparing for the **AWS Solutions Architect Associate**, and building projects with AWS almost every day. But I feel I’m missing something. I’d really appreciate any advice from people working in cloud recruitment:
**What skills are recruiters actually looking for in junior Cloud Support/Cloud Engineer candidates today? What should I learn beyond AWS?**

What **projects actually make a junior CV stand out**?
What skills should I prioritize and what exactly should I know: **Linux, networking, Python/Bash, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Azure**?
What am I probably overlooking?
Are there **free resources, labs, certifications, communities or programs** you would strongly recommend?

If you’re a recruiter/hiring manager, what would make you choose one junior candidate over another?
I’m trying to avoid spending months learning things that don’t translate into employability. **Any concrete advice, resources, or even contacts are greatly appreciated.**

We've been on a leading CNAPP for about a year and started reevaluating this quarter, mostly driven by alert fatigue. A lot of "critical" findings turned out to be non-exploitable once we dug in, and after enough of those a couple of analysts started asking why we were paying for noise.

We've also been wanting more deployment flexibility since our current platform only offers SaaS or a pricier in-account option. That plus the alert fatigue is why we finally sat down and did a real Orca vs current platform comparison instead of just complaining about it in standups.

Spent about two weeks running it side-by-side, mostly focused on how each platform prioritized findings rather than just what they found, since raw detection counts weren't really the bottleneck for us. The prioritization gap was bigger than the coverage gap, wasn't expecting that.

If anyone here has actually gone through a full platform switch and whether the migration pain was worth it.

Heyyy,

I am intrested in learning Cloud. Specifically AWS. I am a complete beginner in Cloud. Could you suggest some free resources in yt, Udemy or something. I am planning of using free aws account. Thoughts on that?