The deal — one of its largest acquisitions ever — will give Amazon a physical network of health-care offices and providers, as well as access to technology the start-up has built to enable virtual doctor visits. It adds to the company’s existing health-care portfolio, which includes an online pharmacy and Amazon Care, a virtual and in-home urgent care service.

“There is an immense opportunity to make the health care experience more accessible, affordable and even enjoyable for patients, providers, and payers,” One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin said in a statement.

The deal is a sign of Amazon’s long-simmering health care ambitions. As the company has marched from one retail business to another — including books, CDs, electronics, dog food, diapers and clothes — it has had to look in less obvious spots to find opportunities that can provide meaningful expansion.

It seems that AWS is the underpinning of a lot of the technology we use today — websites, monitoring, data management, and more. What’s more, the prevalence of AWS cloud support engineers are more in-demand.

For the uninitiated, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud is Amazon’s cloud platform that offers over 175 applications, ranging from infrastructure and storage to blockchain and IoT. Many developers use AWS Cloud applications when building out their products.

With so many AWS applications and over 1 million customers, it takes a fleet of talented AWS Cloud Support Engineers to keep things moving. So what does being an AWS cloud support engineer entail?

A Day in the Life of an AWS Cloud Support Engineer

A day in the life of an AWS Cloud Support engineer involves a combination of helping customers with their AWS applications, debugging reported problems, building and maintaining AWS test instances, and working with AWS Cloud Developers to better understand and support the product.

Recently, Amazon’s AWS blog shared a day in the life of one of their AWS Support engineers to try and attract more support engineers to apply for jobs with them. This AWS Support Engineer worked on a large variety of different issues with various customers, from talking a new customer through launching their Amazon EC2 instance to assisting an existing customer with their massive data migration.

Each day, there are new problems ready to be solved and sometimes there are even new products to learn and support. That’s where the testbed comes in. AWS Cloud Support Engineers generally own and maintain their own testbed.

This can be used to run automated tests, build out a new application in order to learn how to troubleshoot it better, and even try to simulate problems experienced by customers.

Since AWS Cloud supports applications on the web, they must be up and running all the time. If something goes wrong, there must be a support engineer available to help. This means that AWS Cloud Support Engineers typically work in shifts: a day shift and a night shift. The work is typically the same,  if you’re a night owl, this could be a really great job opportunity for you!

The Skillset of an AWS Cloud Support Engineer

AWS Cloud Support Engineers should have a solid understanding of AWS applications, cloud computing, networking, system administration, scripting, automated testing, security, system architecture, and network administration.

Since this role centers on supporting customers, it’s important for AWS Cloud Support Engineers to be tireless troubleshooters who can see both the big picture and get down to details. Expert knowledge of AWS applications is a must. Plus, experience in customer and technical support is a huge plus.

AWS Cloud Support Engineer Expected Salary

According to Paysa, AWS Cloud Support Engineers make an average of $155,000 a year, with the top percentile of earners making close to $200,000.

Keep in mind that Paysa’s numbers are based on salaries at Amazon. You can also be hired as an AWS Cloud Support Engineer at other companies — like Digital Island, Borland, or Pinnacle Systems. Those salaries average closer to $134,000.

Your Journey to Being an AWS Cloud Support Engineer

If helping customers with their AWS Cloud products, maintaining and monitoring your own testbed, and making well over six figures a year sounds like your dream job, then it’s time to get started adding those skills to your resume!

Amazon RDS for Oracle now Supports Oracle Database 19c

Introducing notifications for AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline

AWS supports Automated Draining for Spot Instance Nodes on Kubernetes

https://amzn.to/2CqcCKx

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.

Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types – optimized for memory, performance or I/O – and provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. You can use the AWS Database Migration Service to easily migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS.

Benefits

Easy to administer

Amazon RDS makes it easy to go from project conception to deployment. Use the Amazon RDS Management Console, the AWS RDS Command-Line Interface, or simple API calls to access the capabilities of a production-ready relational database in minutes. No need for infrastructure provisioning, and no need for installing and maintaining database software.

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Highly scalable

You can scale your database’s compute and storage resources with only a few mouse clicks or an API call, often with no downtime. Many Amazon RDS engine types allow you to launch one or more Read Replicas to offload read traffic from your primary database instance.

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Available and durable

Amazon RDS runs on the same highly reliable infrastructure used by other Amazon Web Services. When you provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, Amazon RDS synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). Amazon RDS has many other features that enhance reliability for critical production databases, including automated backups, database snapshots, and automatic host replacement.

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Fast

Amazon RDS supports the most demanding database applications. You can choose between two SSD-backed storage options: one optimized for high-performance OLTP applications, and the other for cost-effective general-purpose use. In addition, Amazon Aurora provides performance on par with commercial databases at 1/10th the cost.

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Secure

Amazon RDS makes it easy to control network access to your database. Amazon RDS also lets you run your database instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which enables you to isolate your database instances and to connect to your existing IT infrastructure through an industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. Many Amazon RDS engine types offer encryption at rest and encryption in transit.

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Inexpensive

You pay very low rates and only for the resources you actually consume. In addition, you benefit from the option of On-Demand pricing with no up-front or long-term commitments, or even lower hourly rates via our Reserved Instance pricing.

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Per Technology Group analysis, a merger of Amazon and Oracle could unlock significant value. While the idea may sound very ambitious, in order to keep itself at the top of the cloud technology food-chain, Oracle may be the best acquisition Amazon could ever make. We detail why Amazon could acquire Oracle, and also estimate how much a potential deal could be worth in an interactive dashboard. Our estimate is based on Oracle’s standalone value as well as its value as a part of the combined entity with Amazon. You can modify any of the key drivers to visualize the impact of changes on the potential acquisition price.

Related: Is $20 Billion in Google Cloud Revenue Possible by 2020?

Why we think Amazon can acquire Oracle

Overview of the Two Companies:

• Amazon was possibly the first vendor to have created the public cloud ecosystem in mid-2000s, but Oracle has been in the database business for nearly 40 years.
• The idea of Amazon Web Services was to have infrastructure that could be rent out to customers who wanted lower bills for their storage and compute requirements. Per Technology Group estimates, AWS commands an enterprise value of $493 billion at an EV/EBITDA of 27x (2020 EBITDA of $18 billion).
• Oracle was late to the game with its first generation of cloud offerings failing and the company subsequently investing heavily in development to bring to market its Gen 2 cloud. Per Technology Group estimates, Oracle should have an enterprise value of $251 billion at an EV/EBITDA of 12.7x (2020 EBITDA of $20 billion).
• AWS’s approach was creating a product and then have users adopt it. Oracle has had that user base for a long time and was unable to service the need that AWS was able to cater to. The result was AWS today commands over 40% in the public cloud market with Oracle not even in the top 5, despite Oracle running nearly 50% of the world’s databases.

Rationale #1: Customers will get the security of Gen 2’s architecture and AWS’s customer service, leading to a differentiated product versus competition

• AWS’s early mover advantage may now be waning on account of competition in the market from Microsoft Azure (which has become the underlying fabric of Microsoft’s B2B and B2C offerings), Google Cloud (under its new chief) and IBM’s cloud offerings (post the Red Hat deal).
• Another factor weighing against the incumbent cloud leaders is the drying up of the low hanging workloads that could have been migrated to the cloud. The remaining workloads are mostly mission critical and have high security requirements.
• Another factor that goes against AWS in this contest are the list of data breaches that have occurred at AWS customers such as Capital One, Malido Air etc. During Oracle’s annual analyst meet, Larry Ellison was vocal about how Gen 2’s architecture could have avoided such breaches.

Rationale #2: AWS is yet to create a credible database alternative to Oracle. Bringing Oracle’s database on AWS could make the combination the de facto choice for start-ups and enterprises alike

• Oracle has been trying to move its databases to the Oracle cloud, the company’s software growth has not been able to offset declines in its other businesses.
• On the other hand, AWS has had a preferred partnership with VMware to bring AWS to on-premise systems (where Oracle and Microsoft have a leadership position).
• Considering that Oracle wants customers to move to a cloud and AWS wants on-premise customers to expand into, we think Oracle and AWS represent a good complementary pair.

Based on our revenue and EBITDA forecasts for Amazon and Oracle, and our estimates for potential gains as a combined entity, we believe that there Amazon can profitably acquire Oracle for a figure that is at a substantial premium to its current market cap.

What are the risks and hurdles to a potential combination?

A merger between the two tech giants comes with its own set of risks and hurdles though, including:

1. History of rivalry:

• AWS’s Andy Jassy and Oracle’s Larry Ellison have been embroiled in a war of words about each other’s products and operational strategies for years.
• However, during Oracle’s 2019 analyst day event Ellison appeared to be more respectful of AWS

2. Technology stack combination considerations:

• Oracle’s Gen 2 cloud separates the client and cloud control computers, while AWS runs a huge distributed system.
• The cost of integrating the two system and applying Oracle’s autonomous database capabilities to AWS’s offerings could pose a technology challenge due to the size of the combined customer base and their diverse requirements.

3. Anti-competitive concerns:

• With a share of well over 40% in the public cloud market and over 50% in the database market, the combined entity is likely to attract a lot of regulatory scrutiny in terms of how it will affect competition.

4. The sheer size of the deal:

• We value Amazon’s AWS division at $493 billion and Oracle at $250 billion.
• At an estimated valuation of just under $1.1 trillion, Amazon is the larger company by a substantial margin
• Keeping Amazon’s growing presence in several nascent industries, a merger will essentially bring Oracle under AWS’s fold.
• Amazon will have to cough up a significant premium to Oracle’s current market value in order to finalize a deal.