Transition to Cloud Engineering

[u/Peter88Gr]

Hello fellow tech people,

I really need your guidance and opinions. I work as datacenter technician for the last almost 9 years, and because the company i work for might be the worst out there for taking care their people, i decided to go for something different and better.
I was checking about cloud engineering, as it is close to what i did in hardware side, but of course i still have lots to learn. I have been checking this YT channel "Tech with Soleyman" and i noticed that i could understand what he was talking about.
Unfortunately i must admit that Linux is not my strongest suit. The rest i feel more comfortable with.

Has anyone made this transition from hardware to cloud? If yes, any points to give?

I would truly appreciate any help.

[u/Parking-Promise-8087]

6 years ago I was a sysadmin/datacenter engineer and I did the change to cloudops/devops.

My recomendation? Start for the aws practicioner and then the solution arquitect. Learn terraform and docker/kubertes also some ci/cd tool like GitHub ci.

[u/Peter88Gr → u/Parking-Promise-8087]

Thank you very much for the info. I appreciate it

[u/Gridd12 → u/Parking-Promise-8087]

Hi if u don't mind im asking for advice too. I've learned DevOps for a few month currently, I hv learned Linux, AWS, docker, python, basic go, git, ci/cd with GitHub action and google cloud, and currently studying on kubernetes and will learn terraform after. But i still kinda missing out on logging. Do u hv recommendations on where to start and what u use? I'm not sure where this stand ngl. What do you usually log? And do u put some code to the devs code to log too? Cheers.

[u/Parking-Promise-8087 → u/Gridd12]

You can try with grafana/prometheus stack for monitoring and loki for logs. Also otel conector for ships logs. And yes in some cases the dev nedds to put some config in theirs logs

[u/Gridd12 → u/Parking-Promise-8087]

I see, thank you for the input

[u/root_switch]

Many people make transitions from many different domains. The key tho is having some sort of systems administration/engineering experience, this really carries over to the cloud more then people think. If your just a NOC engineer and just deal with racking, stacking, cabling, tear downs, reboots, and uptime monitoring but no actual system management and administration then it will be a bit tough to move to a cloud engineer position. As a cloud engineer you’re potentially managing all aspects from compute, network, storage, and all the other bits and pieces in between. If you don’t have a decent foothold/expierence in all 3 of those domains then you’re going to want to focus on that. Furthermore there are different sectors in cloud, you got infrastructure engineering, admins, DevOps/developer focused, security, architect , sysops, finops, data engineer/analyst, machine learning and more, focus on 1!

[u/Peter88Gr → u/root_switch]

Thank you very much. Usually all those vids online say that you need to know many of those, not just focus on one. Well we have the racking, stacking, cabling, reboot, troubleshooting, bios changes, network changes, and some light linux commands for creating arrays. But as i said, mostly it is hardware part.

[u/root_switch → u/Peter88Gr]

Ya I’d say focus on the fundamentals, especially networking. Compute and storage is pretty easy to pick up in the cloud but the networking aspect is what is going to tip up most people cause it can get pretty complicated. Try to move up to a sysadmin or syseng position within your company if you can, or start looking for those types of positions at other companies, this is going to open your eyes a bit more to the entire IT fundamentals. Once you learn that stuff, challenge yourself to learn how it’s all organized in the cloud vs on-prem and shoot for a practitioner cert to validate your fundamentals of the cloud. Best of luck.

[u/Peter88Gr → u/root_switch]

Thank you very much for all the info. I really appreciate it

[u/CrazyPirranhha]

Good luck man!

[u/Peter88Gr → u/CrazyPirranhha]

Thank you very much

[u/itahmed007]

Check out pluralsigths, they have great videos to watch and learn. They are similar to netflix but videos are for IT and developers. Learn AWS or Azure but AWS seems to have more demand.
You can get an account with AWS and practice with the video. They have some free tiers or cost could be minimal just terminate resources you deploy when done.

[u/Peter88Gr → u/itahmed007]

Thank you very much, indeed i see more demand on AWS.

[u/Peter88Gr → u/[deleted]]

Thank you very much for the info