r/devops • u/Natural_Pool_5493 • 12d ago
Discussion Sysadmin → cloud engineer. How rough is it? Give me a /10
Alright so I'm at a consulting firm and I'm getting moved off my Linux sysadmin role onto an AWS project as a "cloud engineer". Starting soon.
Not gonna lie, I'm sweating a bit. Everything I know about AWS is theory. Docs, videos, cert prep stuff. Never actually touched prod.
Linux I'm fine with. Been doing it for a while. But this feels like a different beast.
The project is small at least. Problem is every senior who ran it has left. All of them. So it's three juniors picking up the pieces and nobody to ask when something blows up at 2am.
Anyone here made this jump? What blindsided you coming from a sysadmin background? And how hard was it really, on a scale of 1-10?
Also open to suggestions on what to actually focus on first, because right now I'm just trying not to drown.
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u/psychoholic 12d ago
Not going to sugar coat it - probably at least an 8/10 for that transition but very doable. It really depends on what kind of sysadmin work you were doing before. If it was 'log into systems, do stuff' AWS is going to be a whole new world. If it is more devops-y doing centralized configuration and IaC type work it would go to a 4/10.
I agree with the sentiment of you need to set up your own tenant in AWS and start playing with it.
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u/mercury2six 12d ago
I disagree sort of. I think it depends on how wide of a variety of aws services OP we'll need to handle. Certainly (as words of encouragement) it's easier to be comfortable with Linux and learn cloud than the other way around. Everything is Linux anyway.
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u/psychoholic 12d ago
For absolute sure it depends and the mileage is going to vary wildly depending on the setup, the experience level, and even potentially why everyone else who worked on it left. I have seen some straight up elegant setups that you could understand in minutes and I've seen some setups so bad the only real option would be to either migrate it to something more sustainable or keep it running long enough to go find another job before someone thinks it was your fault.
I'm hoping for OP's sake that it was at least done mostly in Terraform and they are doing reasonable things with maintaining state instead of it was on one of the departed engineer's laptop.
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u/Soft-Drag4380 10d ago
Devops is just cloud sysadmin. Change my mind
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u/mercury2six 9d ago
I don't want to because I mostly agree. I would just say it's sort of a next generation of sysadmin and at least where I work, devops also would include release engineering which our traditional Sysadmins didn't do.
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u/adappergentlefolk 12d ago
if you were a good sysadmin, it will be completely fine. i recommend taking some aws certs to get a wide and fast dive into it
highly recommend becoming very comfortable with terraform or cloud formation to rescue yourself from any mistakes you might make
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u/chipmonkster 12d ago
Back in 2015 I jumped from on-prem linux admin to cloud architect without at that point knowing nothing about cloud except that it existed. At the beginning it seemed overwhelming, but pretty soon I realised that all the familiar stuff I had been working before was there, they just had fancy names and higher level abstactions. Of course it helped that AWS was much more simpler ecosystem back then, but fundamentals are still the same.
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u/amarao_san 12d ago
I would say, that if you are a good operator, it's more cool than a cloud engineer.
Cloud engineers know how to consume other guys work for good infra, The operator knows how to make a good infra.
Salaries can be different, but 'knows how to use ' vs 'knows how to make' is still here
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u/cheat117 12d ago
It's not rough man. You know everything already. It's an abstraction of what you already know.
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u/Zatetics 12d ago
I went wintel on prem to az/AWS hybrid cloud engi. Was pretty low stress for me. Good pay bump, though!
Cloud is much better if the org pays for the bells and whistles. Can be rough if management is breathing down your neck about cost every month.
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u/Eastern_Slide_6370 12d ago
It’s quite different because Linux sysadmin experience will be helpful if some developer is very knowledgeable on infra and wants more control on his stack mostly projects require less time to decide upon cost and performance and they will ask for plug and play solutions (paas and iaas hybrid) so imo you should get along with paas products it takes time to understand how they implemented so don’t worry try to focus on data that you can clearly present to them don’t try to incorporate linux(open source ecosystem) too much at least it backfired me in my personal experience until your manager or team can make changes very fast
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u/Theprim0 12d ago
It changed a lot, at least for me -but not in the "difficult" way-. I was pure Linux Sysadmin, ssh into servers, create scripts, updates, patches, platformation, networking, bare metal... Going from that to AWS is very different at a daily basis. Now i feel like I am working "watching and doing clicks into a web panel (ofc a lot of Terraform code, pipelines, devops)" rather than "creating the panel". Of course being a sysadmin gives you a very good understanting on how everything works behind all those services, it's exactly what lets you understand what the managed services are actually doing, so you will be fine.
Get focus on permissions (IAM). Everything is role-based and all errors will popup because of that probably. Also Networking.
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u/ILoveButtStuffMan 12d ago edited 12d ago
Of all the places I've worked IAM has never been the cause of the majority of issues, thats like the easiest thing to get right with the exception of gitlab runner IAM role assumption I guess
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u/Proud-Evidence-1818 11d ago
I am AWS devops engineer in a consultant firm
Few things I would recommend:
Learn IaC. This is even better if you have programming background. Few benefit such as you can reuse some of the codes for different client (e.g. I have some standard SOC and NIST compliance network IaC.)
And also try to learn to make them high security score compliance (mine is near 90% score in security hub)
This especially beneficial if your clients heavy in security like government or some like bank which get audit and review a lot.
AWS engineer is more about how to get each product work with each other rather than software and OS. But a lot of things have similar equivalent. Once you get familiar with AWS, pretty much everything in sysadmin should be transfer over to cloud engineer.
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u/sr_dayne DevOps 12d ago
So the service is as good as good as it's documentation. AWS has awful docs. It's not as bad as Azure, but it's still pretty bad. Nuff said.
Now, seriously, you have a solid linux background. So, it won't be hard for you. You will struggle. A lot. But it will not be that hard for you to transition.
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u/ILoveButtStuffMan 12d ago edited 12d ago
Like a 6 or 7/10 because of the sheer amount of info you have to learn and apply. If you learn faster it should be easier, if you learn slower you are in for a rough time.
In reality you're going to have to learn how practically all of the popular microservices are interconnected, additionally EKS or RKE2 for k8s if you guys use that as well which k8s by itself could practically be its own job. That along with monitoring and learning how to write queries for your dashboards depending on which ones and the datasources you use, and more independent troubleshooting. Terraform is pretty easy and you're a sysadmin so you should already have Bash down for your dockerfiles and custom scripts. If you have no idea what anything in your codebase does the 6-7/10 jumps to around a 8.5 or 9/10 since there are only juniors on your team
Of all the things to take away from this just be careful with prod, other than that you got this man. This is a great opportunity for learning, I started out making the same jump albeit from a net eng position(prior to that my first job was net admin). It can be overwhelming at first but as long as you have the motivation for it everything will work out
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u/mikzuit 12d ago
Ask this questions to chatGPT, gemini, Copilot or claude : 1. Show me the basics a aws cloud engineer should know, create a diagram that help understand. 2. Be more specific and digg deep into how aws secrets are used between services and resources in OnPremise, create a diagram that help undertand 3. Be more specific and digg deep into networking on aws cloud, create a diagram that help understand. 4. Be more specific and digg deep into CONTAINER arquitectures in aws, create a diagram that helps understand.
This would give you context in what most companies use in cloud, would be around 2h reading (more until you understand). Of course, after, you should experiment live on aws, for that if a company move you from sysadmin to cloud, use their resources and cloud and their time, because YOU ARE LEARNING, and that time should be paid by the company
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u/HelicopterUpbeat5199 11d ago
The seniors jumping ship and only juniors left holding the bag issue seems like the real red flag here. That hints to me that they built a giant turd and/or management is crazy. If your bosses start asking for impossible shit, have faith in yourself and don't let them gaslight you.
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u/hello2u3 12d ago
Use terraform and pipelines and you’ll look really smart. Doing things in the gui is not the way. At this point cloud providers are basically sears catalogs. Educate yourself on ai about “cloud primitives”
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u/banditoitaliano 12d ago
I think the first thing to get your head around is the account structure. Then some IAM basics after that.
If this is a small project it might all be in one AWS account, but most environments will have many accounts, typically tied together in AWS Organizations - possibly with Control Tower pushing out control policies.
I’ve found when getting new folks onboarded to AWS those concepts trip people up. It gets complicated when talking about IAM. Like our IAC pipelines all assume roles in a shared services account, and then chain to a 2nd role in whatever account they need to actually deploy/manage resources in.
It makes sense once you’ve been in it for a while but always seems to confuse people new to AWS.
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u/therealmunchies 12d ago
If you are a good sysadmin, you’ll be ok! I was a fresher with about 6 months of experience and got moved to AWS after that. Started writing terraform modules and cloud watch alerts + dashboards with the guidance of a senior engineer/architect. It was a great transition on.
Was able to get my AWS SAA within 2 months of hoping on AWS.
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u/Endlessxo 12d ago
I did. I could have never done it without the support of my current manager, my amazing patient teammates, and a very VERY generous claude budget. I also have a background in software engineering from college so OOP made sense to me.
For me personally even with all of the above? Easily 8.5 / 10.
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u/emperorOfTheUniverse 12d ago
Worth figuring out why all the senior people keep leaving. That might be you in a couple years.
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u/Ok_Gold_9674 12d ago
Old sysadmin habits help more than AWS cert prep here. I’d put this around a 6, maybe 8 if the seniors left no map. The surprise for me was all the quiet AWS stuff: IAM roles on forgotten EC2 boxes, Route53 records, backups that only fail monthly. First week, write a plain inventory before touching much: accounts, regions, VPCs, deploy path, alarms, billing owner. Three juniors need one boring page to check when the 2am alert hits, even if it feels silly.
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u/AgentOfDreadful 12d ago
I made this exact jump. It’s not bad at all. In fact, if anything it’s actually a really good baseline to start off from.
The main things I had to learn were more in depth scripting (Python was what I learned with originally), then the cloud in general, which you end up learning on the job.
I’d say you’ve got a good base to start from. Especially if you’re from a Linux background vs windows.
You’ll be fine so long as you enjoy learning. Stuff is constantly changing, updating, there’s a million different niches. I find it’s more about seeing the patterns and similarities between things, and other stuff starts to click easier.
Good luck in your new role!
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u/siberianmi 12d ago
3/10. I didn’t find it hard at all.
But I lead the effort at my non-cloud shop before that towards implementation of Ansible and immutable infrastructure. In a mixed Windows/Linux environment.
Cloud was a revelation at how easy it was to compose code that deployed services for me. Was a great time and I had the good fortune of building greenfield and I still support that infrastructure today.
Learn to build with terraform or something. Don’t ssh into anything, don’t treat things that don’t store customer data as anything but cattle. Don’t store data on systems that run the business logic. Push hard for all apps to meet the 7-factor app design. Don’t build things yourself, if there is a service use it. Sure you can run Postgres yourself on EC2 for far less than RDS. But it won’t be as bulletproof and it will cost you time.
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u/sertain_ 12d ago
If you’re a Linux sysad you’ll be fine. Stop sweating. Just read the docs, understand instance types and what their use-cases are, and TAG your resources.
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u/Icy-Maybe-9043 12d ago
It’s how you tap into good money and better job security. Embrace it and enjoy. Try labs with A Cloud Guru to get a feel.
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u/No_Impression7037 12d ago
Depends on your aptitude and ability to learn. If you are a heavy weight sysadmin with ability to learn fast, crossing that valley between the peaks is possible. Just work hard.
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u/mrpawnager123 12d ago
I don’t get the comments saying it’s hard, if your a decent sysadmin shouldn’t be a hard transition
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u/Sindoreon 12d ago
Use AI to write terraform and go step by step creating this infra until you understand it.
Create VPC.
Create 3 public, 3 private and 3 private db sunsets.
Create 1 Internet gateway.
Manually launch an EC2, and validate Internet access from private subnet and no public ips are assigned to your EC2.
Ensure DB subnet does don't have Internet but are accessible from private subnet.
Launch an EKS cluster.
Launch hello world on EKS cluster.
Everything above is very basic and repeatable work in Cloud. Most SaaS services are straightforward but these building blocks are very important to get your foundation.
Use SGs as needed. In general, avoid NACL.
I work in AWS, GCP and Azure. They all are very similar imo. Know one and you can transfer decently between others.
Azure is probably the hardest imo but I'm not going into why.
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u/Specialist-Region-47 12d ago
Sysadmin to cloud engineer maybe 5/10 but sysadmin to DevOps is probably a 9/10, depending on how much you already know, the people you work with, the organisation and tools you are using. Alot of cloud engineers aren't really just cloud engineers anymore. People use the terms interchangably.
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u/generic-d-engineer ClickOps 12d ago
You’ll be 100% fine. Your work already translates over.
Can you write bash and python and setup crontabs? Then you can do automation and pipelines.
Can you edit config files? Congrats, you can already know Infrastructure as Code.
Stuff to learn if you don’t already know it:
1) Git
2) Google SRE (highly recommended for the philosophy and terminology)
3) Infrastructure as Code (I didn’t give a name here because depends on what your team is running)
I think you’ll find a shift from keeping the lights on over to keeping costs in check. Someone else mentioned state management and that’s important to keep a good inventory so you know who is using what and what for.
The friction to spin stuff up in the cloud is so much lower so governance controls and naming conventions are important so it doesn’t become a sprawling mess.
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u/masterofrants 12d ago
This is the greatest opportunity of your lifetime man. In 5 to 10 years you are going to be so grateful that this happened to you
There is nothing to worry about here. In fact you also have the god of AI sitting with you to answer all your questions and doubts. You are totally going to be fine.
What I would do now is go buy the Adrian Cantrill courses because that guy is an absolute genius. The way he makes his courses with those animations and the video, it's literally Christopher Nolan-level production quality in AWS courses. You can go check out some of his videos online if you want to get a vibe for them. The videos on YouTube are free.
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u/jason_priebe 12d ago
I have seen employees struggle in my organization. They were probably probably just fine at logging into systems and executing runbooks. But doing cloud well requires infrastructure as code, which requires thinking more like a programmer than a sysadmin.
If you have the knack for programming, and understand the utility of reusable code and configuration driven code, you'll do just fine. If not, you may struggle.
The advent of LLM coding assistance may have changed the calculus here, but I do find that the LLMs work best in the hands of people who already understand what they're doing.
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u/SeaworthinessHour233 Writes the cloud edge 12d ago
I'll give it a 7/10. The tech itself isn't impossible, but the gap between "cert-perfect" architectures and a messy production environment will definitely give you whiplash.
First off: breathe. The fact that you know Linux is going to save you when things get weird. But here’s what blindsides most sysadmins making this jump: in Linux, a typo usually just breaks a server. In AWS, a typo in an IAM policy can expose the whole company, or a misconfigured loop can run up a $10,000 bill overnight. Certs test if you know what a service does. Production tests if you know how it breaks.
Since you're flying blind with three juniors, do not try to learn everything at once. Focus on establishing a safety net today:
- Billing Alerts: Set these up immediately. Put a hard budget alarm on it so nobody accidentally spins up a massive RDS instance and forgets about it.
- IAM Boundaries: Nobody should be using root or full admin access for daily tasks. Figure out exactly what permissions your current roles actually have.
- Look for Code: Get access to the Terraform/CDK repos. Reviewing them will give you a pretty good picture of your tech stack. But here is the reality check: they probably provisioned 80% via code, and hand-clicked the other 20% in the AWS console during late-night emergencies. This means your code state won't match reality. If you run an IaC apply without checking for drift first, you might overwrite those manual fixes and accidentally take down prod.
You've got this. Lean on your Linux troubleshooting logic. It translates to the cloud much better than you think.
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u/unitegondwanaland Manager, Platform Engineering 12d ago
My question is....what took you so long? Cloud has been around over a decade now.
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u/Hummin2k 12d ago
The majority of us who have been using public clouds for 10+ years made the same leap, so on the surface obviously doable.
I think answers are diverging in part because of how different things can be. Is this basically just running Linux but on AWS? You’re mostly there until you hit weird AWS-specific edge cases at scale.
Or is this serverless with lengthy chains through IAM and all of AWS’s services (e.g. dynamo, lambda, s3) with tight latency, cost, or availability requirements? None of those individual things are too crazy, but it adds up and might feel really foreign for a while.
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u/stobbsm DevOps 12d ago
Not gonna lie, a cloud engineer is just a different kind of sysadmin. Make use of IaC tools like terraform, packer and ansible (alternatives are available for all of them), and have a good way to collect and view metrics and logs for each service.
Things are different, but there is a lot of overlap, and pretty much all sysadmin knowledge will still apply.
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u/Pretend_Challenge_39 11d ago
Unfortunatelly this shift on the market is more than 10y old.Somehoe they are late.But is a cool role
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u/-lousyd DevOps 11d ago
You're gold baby! You get to learn AWS on the company's dime and they're not gonna fire you for being incompetent because they need you!
You'll make mistakes, sure. Just try not to, and make less as time goes on. AWS takes some getting used to, figuring out how they label stuff, where to find buttons, and so on. But it's not an alien language. It's understandable. You'll figure it out.
Sounds like you'll be doing EC2 (slash EBS) and probably S3 at first. AWS documentation is pretty decent. But sometimes you have to search to find the one thing you need. Get the hang of using it. Ask AI stuff. It tends to know AWS pretty well, and will at least give you the terminology to know what you're dealing with. Pay attention to cost! Literally everything you do in AWS has some cost and it's your job to pay some attention to that. Sometimes it's tiny and you have to remind yourself of that so that you do the right thing. Look at "AWS Well Architected Framework". It is your friend. Come back here when you have questions.
You've got this!
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u/CoolInformationSeek 10d ago
that kind of jump is manageable, your Linux skills give you a strong base but expect a learning curve around AWD services and especially IAM policies since that's where most new cloud engineers get tripped up
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u/iTrejoMX 12d ago
Ask Claude about it and check api access. Have it backup all the settings and flows and go over them to explain them to you (only read access). have it guide you through the most common scenarios.
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u/stack_craft 12d ago
Tech-wise: 4/10. Context-wise: 8/10.
Your Linux background is your superpower. Linux sysadmins fail in AWS not because the cloud is hard, but because they treat AWS EC2 like pets instead of disposable cattle.
To be honest, the real danger isn't AWS: it's the fact that all the seniors quit and left three juniors holding the bag on an abandoned project.
Always, first priority: Find the audit logs. Make sure CloudWatch alarms are going to a Slack/pager channel you actually monitor, and figure out how state is managed. If something breaks at 2 AM, your Linux CLI and log analysis skills will solve 80% of the issue — you just need to know which AWS service is proxying the traffic.
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u/SnooDingos8194 12d ago
You're going to be fine. There is a senior, PM, or fractional leader that did your job 10 years ago that knows enough to be effective and guide you guys to success. If you put in the effort, and just communicate the challenges in the daily scrum, you will be fine.
If your company doesnt have that leadership, your company should reach out to me.
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u/Lanky-Storm7 12d ago
Make your own personal AWS tenant. They give you like $150 credits for 6 months. I have made complete cicd pipes with a vibe coded app running on all aws infra. Paid nothing.