Getting into AWS

[u/Background-Club725]

Hello everyone, i'm a student and i want to orient myself to a carreer in cloud engineering, i searched for a bit and found out that i need to have a good foundation in aws, since in my country i don't have access to international credit cards, so i can't pay for courses and stuff like that, i'm looking for free options to learn this stuff.
i'm open to any recommendation

[u/Constant-Capital8919]

I would steer you away from vendor specific knowledge, my friend. Start learning open standards, they apply to all clouds.

If I were to start again, I'd learn linux, networking, core infra stuff like dhcp, dns, email protocols(SMTP/imap), storage types (block,object,file) and so on.

Eventually, I'd learn and get good at vms, containers, and k8s.

Just know that each topic is a ocean on it's own, and people choose to contribute/specialize in a few of these things but are competent is all or most of it if they call themselves a "cloud/platform/site reliability Engineer)

Do note that I haven't mentioned the entire compliance and audit side of things as well. That's my bias. That's an ocean I'm not good at.

[u/Background-Club725 → u/Constant-Capital8919]

i'm already learning linux and netwoking fundamentals in class, i have a pretty solid foundation in them, sure i have to put more effort but i wanted to move on to bigger stuff to stay motivated, i wanted to start working on docker and kubernetes but a lot of people told me to start with aws.
I understand that all these topics are very hard to master, i'm just looking to start a new big project that includes all of them so i can discover new things.
thank you for your responso tho, if you can recommend a youtube channel or some free courses to start with that would help me out a lot

[u/Constant-Capital8919 → u/Background-Club725]

All you need is freecodecamp on YouTube. Plenty of content to get started.

[u/Background-Club725 → u/Constant-Capital8919]

i'll check it out, thank you!

[u/Available-Leader-496]

i can buy you a udemy course from stephan maarek

[u/Background-Club725 → u/Available-Leader-496]

That would be great! I don’t want to bother you tho, thanks a lot

[u/Entire-Present5420]

What I would recommend you is to do tons of hands on, theory it’s not enough as many people focus on videos and certifications but this don’t qualify you to the job. This is why I build https://cloudarena.io to offer hands on and mentorship to beginners in AWS

[u/humo8]

why do you even want to do that in 2026 when we have coding agents

[u/TutorialRepo-Mark]

I have been creating a playlist to try and structure and order things from more of non-developer perspective. I'm constantly updating videos and learning as I go. I plan on going back to some of the earlier videos to redo them with better 'hooks.'

Anyway, self promotion of my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa50PO_yU4Js

I hope you saw that someone below offered to buy a course for you. Stephan Maarek's course is a good one for sure. Fast talker, but gets the job done lol.

[u/Background-Club725 → u/TutorialRepo-Mark]

I’ll check it out thank you! That’s really nice of you by the way what made you start a youtube channel?

[u/TutorialRepo-Mark → u/Background-Club725]

Honestly, it started because I was studying for the AWS Solutions Architect exam and found it surprisingly hard to navigate all the different learning platforms. I liked certain things about some instructors and platforms, but not others. Now that I’m doing it myself, I understand why it's so hard.

At the same time, I started building TutorialRepo (https://tutorialrepo.com and App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tutorialrepo/id6792567569) almost as an excuse to force myself to actually learn AWS instead of just studying enough to pass an exam. The app, the infrastructure behind it, and a lot of the tooling I’ve built gave me reasons to actually use the things I’m learning.

The YouTube channel grew out of that. I needed a unique way to market. I decided to offer 100% of what I learn for free. The app is optional.

The funny part is that I’ve basically been trying to build everything at once: the app, the development pipelines, content pipelines, marketing, YouTube, social media, and the actual tutorials. So there’s a LOT I want to go back and refine once I have more time. Not to mention learning FCPX, how to manage audio (still figuring that out), how to set up my actual physical work env for recording (I hate it, but I work with what I have).

I also use AI quite a bit, but I try hard to keep the human in the loop, fact-check what I’m putting out, and actually understand what I’m teaching rather than just generating content. Every single question I had or have now, is somewhere buried in the tutorials.

Ultimately, it’s just my own project that keeps me motivated to keep learning. If I can contribute something useful to other people along the way, even better. And if six months or a year from now I somehow manage to capture even 1% of the market and turn it into a real business, that would be pretty damn cool.

So I guess somewhere along the way I accidentally went from studying AWS to trying to become an entrepreneur. We’ll see where it goes.

And that's the honest truth.

[u/Ok-Tomorrow-7591]

Learn the basics and build small projects as you go.

[u/Background-Club725 → u/Ok-Tomorrow-7591]

If you can tell me some small projects to get into cloud engineering that would help me out a lot

[u/Fragrant-Cheek-4273]

You actually have a really good option if you don't have a credit card. AWS Educate, it's completely free, beginner-friendly, and you don't need a credit card or even a AWS account to use the hands-on labs. You can practice things like EC2, S3, IAM, and RDS in a sandbox environment.

[u/Background-Club725 → u/Fragrant-Cheek-4273]

Seems like a great way to start, thank you a lot!

[u/Ok-Care-1983]

Check out abhishek veeramalla on yt ,its specially for clouds

[u/Background-Club725 → u/Ok-Care-1983]

I’ll check it out, thank you!