I wrote a twitter thread in December 2020 in an attempt to collate advice I had given to a bunch of people who made career transition to cloud. It was received relatively well. Its time to convert it into a blog post. Our default choice of cloud for this post would be AWS.
Below is the tweet thread this post is inspired from
I made transition to cloud a few years ago and shared a part of my journey on LinkedIn. I have since been asked by many folks on they can do the same. The journey is not same for everyone, but I try to help them as much as I can. But it cannot scale. He's an attempt to scale it -16:01 PM - 13 Dec 2020
This post is indented for developers, system admins, DBA's etc. already working in a professional setting. There is a different thread (which I will convert to a blog post soon) for recent graduates or for people looking to make a career switch.
Breaking into cloud : For fresh graduates and folks looking for career transition from non IT field18:52 PM - 16 Dec 2020
Having made that clear, let jump into the actual stuff.
Trick 1 - Gain entry into the cloud from a familiar landscape
You can do this by using a few services from cloud that you could potentially use at work. Use the cloud which is accessible to your at your workplace. If you don't use cloud at work, start with AWS.
Lets look at few examples -
*Example 1 - * I was working as SQL Dev with Oracle/ MS SQL / PostgreSQL. The moment I had a chance to deploy a PostgreSQL DB in cloud ( which was quite new in the org at that time), I volunteered. Played around it for a bit and complemented it with online classes.
Example 2 - If you are a sysadmin, you can start exploring EC2, LightSail and Elastic beanstalk. If your work permits, try running a development workload of an existing application you are handling on any of these services. If it doesn't, create a free tier account and setup a WordPress or ghost blog. It will cost you less than 10$ to have a nice blog with your custom URL.
*Example 3 - * If you are a front end developer, start with Amplify Framework. Take a look at how it can help you accelerate your development. Try a few features in your dev environment or in your side projects.
Once you start working with these services in the area of your expertise, slowly start looking at other services from AWS that are supporting the application. Look at the solution diagram and reason with yourself why they were chosen the way they are. Slowly and steadily as you gain interest gain, take active participation in cloud related tasks. Fill in the gaps by either taking a cloud certification or by implementing a few side projects.
Oldest comments (0)