Journey Upward
So, you are looking to start a career in the cloud, and you are eager to pick your courses from platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and edX to begin tracking that great journey into the cloud. You are on the hunt to gain a new set of skills and knowledge which you look to lead you to a bigger payday and a greater way of living.
After surveying the internet, talking to your peers, questioning the systems admin at your current job about things that were hot in Information technology, and they told you “Cloud computing was trending in the tech world and edge computing was on the horizon”.
On the internet, you will find countless articles on the cloud championing to be the go-to career choice, especially since the boom of the covid-19 pandemic many companies switched to using the cloud. Making the switch so they can continue to develop, house data, and migrate to being completely digital.
This is one of the most sought-after skills that are high in demand and is only going to increase in demand in the coming years. Well, while that is all good and well there are a few things you may want to consider before slamming your card or your parents down and saying, “sign me up”.
House of Cards
Choosing which CSP you are going to be using is very important. There are a ton of providers out there from A-To-Z such as Cloudflare (a United States provider based in San Francisco, California) to Alibaba Cloud (a Chinese provider, based in Singapore). Not saying you are going to be starting with either one of them but if you continue and make it a career, these are a couple out of the many you may come across.
This is being said because there will be a time when performing multi-cloud (linking different CSPs to each other to utilize benefits such as prices). Aside from them, there are the main three or the big three when it comes to cloud computing. You have Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
AWS is the largest with more availability zones and regions to operate, Azure is right behind AWS but not as large, and Google falls last for size and time. Choosing which one to start with isn’t much of a chore since they all have simple user interfaces (UI) and PowerShell (terminals) to use.
Something quick to note is that once you learned one you pretty much learned them all since most of the setup is the same, just that the names for resources and their placement on the UI are different. However, at this junction, I’m going to be biased since my journey started with AWS. You always remember your first love.
Check out the link below to compare CPS.
https://intellipaat.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud/
Pay to Play
After sorting out which CPS to go with, you then must lay down a credit or debit card to gain access to resources. You are the customer first in the cloud before you become the third-party constructor.
No need to worry about making a large payment because providers offer a trial program after you fill out the payment method and then receive a credit to use. Certain things like processors and storage are free within a defined limit. The use of resources like this does not charge too much, the low is ten cents an hour.
However, it is insanely important to create a budget before building hands-on projects. A good limit (which most instructors will tell you) is $10.00 – $12.00. The purpose of setting a budget is to keep you from screaming Homer Simpson’s famous catchphrase at the end of the month.
I had the unfortunate pleasure of leaving Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) running which triggered an alert to notify me via email that I had exceeded my designated limit. Thankfully my statement was something I could pay but the fact remains. Make sure everything is stopped or deleted before you sign out.
Toughest challenge
Okay at this point, you probably picked out your study material, CPS and access to the cloud were granted. Your budget is set and you’re ready to start building projects to beef up that portfolio. What else could be ahead of you?
Well, if you are anything like me when I made my track into cloud technology and solely focused on cloud. You will be easily overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that are available when starting.
I went in wanting to learn everything cloud and after one or two courses, viewing learning paths, and staring at diagrams I quickly realized that was going to be a tall order since everything from web development to data science could be done in the cloud.
Cloud is an ever-growing technology, that is gaining more and more services at a rapid pace. With more services comes more things to know and be aware of. Staying up to date is going to be challenging because what’s working for you today might not be in use tomorrow.
A good way to stay on top of this is to frequently check white page documents (if you choose AWS), blogs, and forums to see if anything is no longer being used.
If you have made it this far and still are not sure where to pick up course materials to start, below I will leave a few recommendations.
https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-new/
https://www.coursera.org/learn/aws-cloud-practitioner-essentials
If you have found this post to be interesting and you would like to read a quick take on how companies are falling into money pits in the cloud, be sure to check out the link to my post below.
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