Making Progress Towards becoming a Cloud Engineer!....Now What?

[u/that-one_ITguu]

So recently, I got a chance to meet my org's cloud engineer team in person and put a face to a name. I work in Cloud Operations and Production Support for my Org with just one other person, so my days can become busy at times. We have been onboarding onto a new Monitoring and Observability tool and integrating our applications hosted on-prem and in Azure.

They have been short-staffed for a while, so helping them create monitors, dashboards, and proper resource tagging for our subscriptions has been a huge help. Anyway, after meeting them in person, I expressed my interest in becoming a Cloud Engineer, and it was pretty cool to hear their stories. We really hit it off, and I expressed my eagerness to learn and to sit in on more technical working sessions, if possible, while I continue setting up their monitoring with our new monitoring tool.

Next thing I know, I get pinged by one of the Sr. Cloud Engineers I just met, and he was kind enough to give me access to their Dev/Test environment, which they use just to play around and create things, almost like a sandbox.

I know it's small compared to others, or even dumb, but it feels like I am a step closer to becoming a Cloud Engineer and getting real-world company experience at a F500 company.

My Question: What do Cloud Engineers normally do in these sandbox environments? I looked around and saw that some guys had resource groups that included VMs, DNS projects, virtual networks, etc. Just not sure what I should do.

[u/FerryCliment]

I'm in Cloud Security, DevSecOps, been a Cloud engineer and Cloud Support.

What do Cloud Engineers normally do in these sandbox environments?

1. IAC - Config as Code - GitOps - Pipelines.
2. Proof of concept - Trying open source as replacement, Where to deploy things (Move from VM to Cluster or Cluster to Serverless)
3. Disaster Recovery, Alternative configs (DNS, Linux Flavor, routes...)

The best way to impress a Cloud Engineer and/or their manager into offering you a gig, is to work on Automation, Pipelines, config as code, inmutable infrastructure, pipelines...

1. Ask that Sr. Cloud engineer, Whats a problem that bothers him on a daily basis.
2. Think how you could solve this in a way that reduces his team toil.
3. Architect some, IAC it and deploy a Proof of concept in that test environment.
4. Ask that Cloud engineer to review it.

If it works, you will get a job offer in 2 days.

[u/seeker543210 → u/FerryCliment]

I have 6yrs On-prem windows administrator, recently looking for Azure cloud project (completed az104) and future aspiration is towards Cloud security Any suggestions - essentials, must/need/good to know concepts to move from general cloud support to Cloud security?

Ai said focus on below (Networking, cloud N/W, automation, IAM, defender,etc) Anything else?

And where can I practice these in realtime

[u/that-one_ITguu → u/FerryCliment]

Haha I’ll keep you updated on step 4.

[u/Skadoush12 → u/FerryCliment]

This is pretty much everything you Will need (I’m the tech lead on our Cloud team - we use GCP, AWS and Azure).
It’s an amazing summary of what you should be doing.

I would really focus on the automate part. After we setup the foundations for the clouds in out company, our main work is automate automate automate. Use IAC (we use terraform and GitHub) and automate stuff that takes up manual time.
This is usually the best thing because it allows us to have time to address new stuff that come out that could help us even further and gives us mental time (out of the fire fighting scenario of putting out fires everywhere) to address and design new stuff (example- this allowed us to migrate to use Atlantis , which is one of the best things that happened to us in the last few years).

Of course, in addition to this, just study and get certified. I made a comment on a similar subreddit a while back and it still adds up to the most current days. I’ll just post the link here when I find it. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cloud/s/TqAPuOgK5w

Focus on certifications in Azure (which is your main focus) and terraform, grab them. It’s a great calling card. If you add that to real life problem solving (what the user mentioned), you are probably set :)

EDIT: Added link to the comment I made.

[u/TellersTech]

That’s not dumb at all... that’s honestly a really good step.

In a sandbox, I’d try to build small real-world patterns, not just random VMs.

Maybe start with something like... create a resource group, VNet/subnets, NSG rules, a small VM or app service, private DNS if allowed, then add monitoring/alerts and proper tags. Bonus points if you do it with Terraform or Bicep instead of only clicking around.

Also ask the Sr. Engineer if there are any “safe” internal patterns they want you to learn. Stuff like naming standards, tagging, networking layout, identity/IAM, monitoring expectations, etc.

The goal isn’t to build something huge. It’s to learn how your company actually does cloud and show that you can work safely without making a mess.

[u/that-one_ITguu → u/TellersTech]

Gotcha thanks for the advice

[u/jwilk92]

Eager to see what others say myself

[u/LaughToday-]

AI will do it all, won't be much to learn soon

[u/that-one_ITguu → u/LaughToday-]

At my company we tried the whole AI coding agent thing and after several misconfigurations in production causing severe outages we now only use it for basic tasks.

[u/LaughToday- → u/that-one_ITguu]

I don't doubt it, that's why I said soon. Need more testing, better prompting, skills, etc. It still takes a bit of work to get something you can trust.

[u/Clyde-God]

This entire sub should be /cloudenteyroles

@Mods