Feeling a little left behind at the moment. Checking job sites will do that for you.

Most of the jobs that I'm seeing have moved beyond scripting for the day-to-day work and use it as administrative glue. So Python / Perl are seen as the tools for making sure the backed works, not for doing the actual work. Golang is the new hotness for the back-end processing and heavy-lifting. Which is fine and good, save for I haven't had a whole lot of opportunity to play with AWS on any scale (most of my administrative positions have been with companies that preferred to keep mot of their systems in-house). Add to that my perpetual non-use of Javascript (which has taken over the front-end of the web) and I'm starting to think I made some bad calls in my developer life.

It feels like anything that isn't on the resume as "professional experience" doesn't count.

Is there a way to start with AWS that doesn't cost a lot of money and can get me up to speed fast?

At the coffeeshop that we meet at for Coffee House Coders I remember a conversation where I told another developer what I did (Python and Linux). He commented that was "Old School Development". At the time I was offended, but now I'm thinking he was right.