Do you think AWS will still be THE thing within 5 years? Trying to learn REST/cloud/database stuff as a junior dev, but I'm having trouble with the pile of shit documentation.

Ideally as a junior engineer, that pipeline would be established for you by an ops team.

And yes, in general. Their capability edge only gets wider versus the competition because they're the player that only hires capable engineers and has the least bureaucracy.

AWS is to big to fall overnight.
As long Amazon keeps pumping money into it, its going to be around a long time.

Probably. But my advice is to not take a dependency on any cloud provider's proprietary stuff. Design your stuff so you can pack up and go somewhere else on a whim

@M3m35terJ05h Exactly this. Cloud isn't going away, but cloud won't help you design a better architecture that's easier to maintain and adapt to new requirements.