Are you prepared to leave the company if they don't agree with your point of view?

@AffableAmbler I prefer to get out of this without having to leave, that's why I'm asking :)

For what it's worth, I very much don't believe that Azure could be the next big thing. It may continue to maintain it's niche appeal, or it might go the way of Microsoft Phone. It will never take any significant market share from AWS.

The title and body are asking two different questions. Which one do you want answered? And can you edit them to by in sync?

Getting certified to work on Azure is not a "career path". If you refuse to work on it, you will be seen as a technology elitist. Perhaps technology X is objectively better than Y in measurable ways, but as a professional, if the decision has been made to work on technology Y and you are being paid to work on Y, sometimes you have to swallow your pride and do it.

Maybe the title should be something like "How to gracefully disagree on the technology choice", or "How to voice my concerns about a technology choice", etc.

A career can last 50 years. Very, very few computer-related technologies last that long - maybe Fortran and Cobol. Have you considered the benefit of practicing learning different ways of doing things, and practicing switching between them?

It is called a pay check.

You can tell that. And they will chose somebody else. They will probably also fire you because you don't want to improve and develop with the company.

Change your state of mind and get out of your confort zone. Technologies and stacks are moving faster and faster : you need to be able to adapt. Being qualified both on Azure stack and AWS is a valuable asset, hence, increasing your networth on the job market. Other than that, getting some skills on Azure doesn't mean to forget everything you know on AWS.

If you have no interest to learn, IT is not the field for you.

And when aws has a region wide (or larger) outage again and your company is in the dark because you didn't want to work with azure? Rember you are not being asked to learn this to improve your skills but to be able to help your employer.

@SZCZERZOKŁY Using the tried and proven technology from the worlds largest cloud platform is not harming the company.

My concern would be that the company may have unrealistic expectations about the future success of Azure. If they are counting on it gaining market dominance. This is almost certainly not going to happen.

@SaggingRufus The op did not say he doesn't want to learn. He just wants to specialise in AWS, not Azure.

Keep in mind a lot of advancing happens sideways. I don't believe keeping up with AWS is a full-time effort, market is full of devops people who do AWS and azure. You are shooting yourself in the foot if you refuse to take that opportunity

@JoeW Yes, it's theoretically possible that every AZ in your region could simultaneously fail, but it's extremely unlikely.

@PatriciaShanahan It's worth keeping in mind that AWS is just a platform on which any number of different technologies can co-exist. A company can be very adaptive to change, in regard to development technology, but still use AWS as their preferred cloud platform. You could easily enough host your Fortran and Cobol applications in the same AWS account as your nodejs and asp.net applications.

@SZCZERZOKŁY It shows the OP would rather concentrate his effort to improve his skills in AWS. It doesn't make much sense learning new things just for the sake of it though. There are only so many hours a day. All of the time he spends learning Azure, is time he's not learning AWS.

@user1751825 As long as he do that on company time he's only gaining extra knowledge. Company chosen him for their reasons. Refusing may be received as reluctance to improve and do better job for company. Like people not wanting to learn new program because they are used to paper and pencils.

@user1751825 Just a polite reminder that this is a stack about navigating the Workplace, it's not really the place for tedious borderline spamming your preferred technology/platform.

@motosubatsu Actually since this is Chat, it's the perfect place for tedious borderline spamming their preferred technology/platform. Far easier to ignore that way.