🐧Week 1 of my Cloud Journey - Building a Strong Linux Foundation

It’s been an exciting first week in my cloud journey. While I’ve had some past experience with Linux and basic scripting, it’s been a while since I last explored the cloud. So, I dedicated this week to revisiting the fundamentals and bridging the gap between my existing skills and the next phase of my learning.

I started by moving around directories, installing software, and managing files. I first learned about package management — a tool to find software from repositories, install it, update it, and remove it. Package management taught me that every distribution has its own way of handling software, but the core principle remains same.

Then came process management. At first, “killing” a process was confusing because I had to read about signals and what they actually did. But I soon realized they’re simply different ways of telling the system to stop something that’s not working as intended. Running commands like ps, top, and kill gave me a real snapshot of how the system works in Linux. I knew how to do this in Windows, but in Linux, I had no idea until now.

Next, I dove into user management — creating new users and groups, assigning permissions, and switching between accounts. It was so simple in Linux. In Windows, it’s such a time-consuming process, but in Linux, one or two quick commands and my new user is ready.

I also explored scheduling with cron. Automating simple tasks, like running backups at a specific time, made me realize how much I enjoy automation. But I soon discovered cron’s limitations when I wanted to schedule tasks without fixed times. For example, I wanted to run a script every day, but what if I missed a day? Cron doesn’t handle that, so I had to use Anacron, which exactly handles those edge cases.

On the surface, these might look like random Linux commands and scripts. But in reality, this week gave me important lessons that apply directly to cloud engineering:

• Automation is key. If I repeat something, script it.

• Know what’s running. Process and service management is the backbone of troubleshooting in the cloud.

Conclusion

For Week 2, I’ll be switching tools a bit. My focus will be on Python and boto3, the AWS SDK for Python, so I can start interacting with cloud services. I’ll also try to set up my AWS account (I cant set it up right now because I dont have a dollar card yet) and get it ready for hands-on practice.

Step by step, the journey continues 🚀.