From Zero to Cloud Engineer in 6 months

so i've been in tech since 2014 help desk sysadmin cloud engineer training architect and now a cloud advocate at microsoft i don't have a college degree but i do have experience and this is exactly how i would learn to become a cloud engineer in 2022 i think there are four phases linux and networking programming cloud platform and devops practices if you are completely new to tech in general but you spend every single day studying and you really grind it out i do believe that you could gain the entire skill set that you need to go from zero to a junior cloud engineer skill set in about six months to a year depends on how much time you put into it for each phase i'm going to tell you why it matters some resources that i've used that i would recommend some tasks you should be able to accomplish and maybe some project ideas the order of phases that i told you is the one that i would follow and if you prefer text you can go to learn to cloud.guide which is a guide i put together it's free it's open source available on github with a couple of other friends and it's just based on our experience learning cloud and there's a lot more sort of content and guide info there than i could cover in this video uh but yeah with all that being said hi i'm gps and welcome to a new video phase one linux and networking the reason i put these two together is because the cloud is just a bunch of linux servers that are networked together so obviously having a foundation in both of those topics is pretty crucial now individually they are careers and specialties entirely on their own so you're not expected to become a professional in either one or both right just you know gaining a fun foundational knowledge is fantastic and becoming comfortable with a command command line terminal things like that it's all what linux administration is and a lot of networking tasks are also accomplished via commands so you get sort of your best of both worlds when you become comfortable with the command line and moving into programming moving into the cloud platform section moving into devops practices all of those are going to use commands to accomplish tasks so if you sort of start with it you're going to set yourself up for success commands like you know cd command to change directories ls command to list things you know create files copy files move files with make deer copy remove touch you know find things with a locate where is which find um understanding how to get more help on commands that you're using with the man man pages and the like help commands um being familiar with how to view logs in the like var log directory and how to display the content of files with cat less more tail using grep using set to filter your output how to use pipelines with the pipe operator how to put pipelines together with the pipe operator how to use nano and vam to manipulate files how to install packages how to take a look at processes that uses processes on your server with uh what's like ps top nice kill these are commands um there's a couple of other things uh i'll sort of like pause here and you can take a look at what things that i usually recommend um but my absolute favorite resource for learning linux was is this book called linux basic for hackers specifically the first 11 chapters i have blog posts around this content that i learned as well on madebygps.com so you can go to the linux tab you can take a look there but the first 11 chapters of that book fantastic it's such an engaging way to learn it is focused a little bit more on tasks that are security related but trust me you're going to learn everything that you need to learn in terms of becoming comfortable with linux for networking there's this course called i think it's called computer networking course on free code camp it is about 10 hours long but if you like to exit or one and a half um you'll get through it obviously quicker and there is a lot of information there it could be a little overwhelming but if you spread your time over uh you know like a couple of weeks you'll learn a lot there concepts that are important for cloud is you know understanding how to put together virtual networks and how to organize your network with subnets and and using private ip addresses public iep addresses uh different sort of ways of setting up networks things like that which you'll learn when you go through this course i think the free codecam course is free i think actually it is free it's on youtube and then the book is not free but it's relatively inexpensive in my opinion with um in terms of like how much content is actually in that stuff right so some project ideas that you could do is the most obvious and the first one you should definitely do is install linux on a vm you can use something like virtualbox or install it on maybe a spare computer or something like that if you need help picking a distro i recommend pop os i love pop os but you could pick anything out there right and try you could also try deploying your own cloud there's this thing called next cloud i recently did it for myself it's pretty great it's like an alternative to stuff like google drive onedrive and things like that and you can deploy that on your own computer and your own vm give that a try you'd also try deploying your own nas server with freenas there's like so many fun things that you can do in terms of linux and networking realms so give those a try also the book and the course the book and the video course i recommend will also have some project ideas to go through those as well all right let's move on to phase two programming alrighty so when it comes to cloud there are actually full roles that are dedicated dedicated dedicated 100 to cloud development where you will be building full-on applications and you will need to understand how to program absolutely everything but when it comes to cloud engineering cloud administration you will be utilizing code but more in the context of automating your tasks and sort of building scripts and eventually building like infrastructure as code to deploy your stuff to the cloud now this doesn't mean that you don't need to learn to program i personally believe that if you pick up a language like python and understand your basics like variables functions um you know when to use arrays lists dictionaries basic data types uh strings booleans things like that iterations for loops um even things like understanding uh how to test your code and why it's important and then some like uh object oriented programming concepts so like your fundamentals when you're learning any programming language will highly highly benefit you now you don't need to go more in depth into into those things but you know on a pick up a learn to python course there are so many python books out there i think they're a few that i can name is um like a python crash course book an introduction to oh no automate the boring with python is also a fantastic book free code camp has also a learn python course now i personally don't use python but it is a very beginner friendly language and it's used so much a lot of the job listings out there ask for python skills so as a beginner i would recommend that for you and there's a lot of community there's a lot of content out there too again once you learn the fundamentals sort of translating that into another language if you need to pick up another language will be a lot easier but as a beginner go for python okay now one thing i wanted to add is uh in the previous step you would have been introduced to bash scripting bash is almost like a universal programming language almost every single linux server that you're going to deploy up deploy out there will have bash available without having to install and there's no other language out there that has that same capability right so becoming familiar with you know using commands and putting together in a bash script and writing bash groups is also very powerful right um there are other things that you could learn like powershell you know bash powershell python i know go is very popular uh rust and all these kinds of things but again i want you to focus on being a beginner and utilizing community content all to your favor because when you're getting started you're going to be overwhelmed right so that's why i recommend python in terms of projects all the resources that i've mentioned will have projects for you to do so just lean into those you could also do things like i don't know create like a score tracker where you type in the name you make like a command line program with python type in the name of a team it'll give you like the um scores like the last game that that team played the score of that game uh do make sure you create a github profile and create a readme where you just introduce yourself um just you know google what that means uh github profile is where you're going to showcase all of the things that you create and a readme is the space that you get to sort of describe or provide information into what that project is set itself up set that self set yourself up for success by creating one of those um and yeah i think that's it for this phase now let's move into phase number three cloud platform all right and you might be thinking like hey i want to learn to become a cloud engineer but like in your sort of list of phases cloud platform is the third one again i'm telling you i'm trying to set you up for success and there's some sort of prerequisites and skills that throughout the rest of your career in cloud are going to be very very crucial so that's why linux and networking and programming are before cloud platform now i personally think that the best way to pick up a cloud platform and learn one as a complete beginner is studying for a certification because that guided learning that sort of you know every certification has sort of a curriculum that you need to be able to know before you take it and that guided learning is crucial crucial crucial at the beginning once you're more familiar once you have one under your belt i think then you can start to like just do more like hands-on and more projects and things like that and you couldn't get you could get another certification you could get more like a specialized certification or whatever um but i think for those first steps just really studying for one certification for whichever cloud you want to do will probably be your best like your best bet there's this project called the cloud resume challenge and it's the majority of people have completed it using aws services i have my own flavor of that challenge called the azure resume challenge and there will be links to these projects in the description as well and that will get you hands-on with a bunch of azure cloud services the cloud resume challenge will get you hands-on with the lot of aws ones and i think there's even a gcp one out there i'm not a hundred percent sure but in terms of which cloud to pick no matter which one you pick go do the cloud resume challenge you're gonna get hands on with a bunch of things out there you're gonna learn a lot right uh in terms of learning a cloud and like i guess let's address that which one should i learn aws gcp or azure pick one of those if you still can't decide to pick one that it has like the most amount of jobs in your area for the majority of people it's probably going to be aws for me personally was azure which is why i learned azure and it worked out because now i work at microsoft right if you still can't pick i would recommend azure because then you can watch a bunch of my content i put out azure content every single week i do a lot of live streams with the microsoft reactor on a bunch of different azure technologies um so i personally can you know provide help that's why i would say like oh learn azure but i think you can't go wrong with either you know aws gcp or azure a lot of people ask me like hey there there are these plot plot these paid cloud platforms out there that are like educational platforms that you can pay like a monthly fee or yearly fee and they give you like courses but also like labs and stuff like that it's up to you if you want to use that i remember when i was getting started i had access to linux academy but my employer was paying for it i don't think i would have paid for it on my own because it was pretty expensive and i was like really poor back then but maybe it's something that you can get your employer to pay for uh also each cloud platform is going to have like a free trial and free credits that you get when you sign up so absolutely you know give that a try uh and make sure you whenever you sort of create something in cloud in the in your cloud environment that you delete it once you're done if not you're gonna rack up some bills i have videos on my channel on how to set up alerts mistakes that i've made a bunch of other things so go take a look at that things that you should be familiar with at the end of this phase is just an understanding of best practices for cloud infrastructure reliability performance efficiency and understanding i'm not expecting you to like fully build on full solutions that implement all these things you know identity how to grant access and provoke access to different users and applications uh how to set up billing alerts and emails and things like that and budgets how to use object storage so in i'd be s3 in azure would be blob storage i'm not sure what it's called in gcp um how to deploy virtual machines or virtual machine scale sets you know virtual machines that scale how to work with networking so how to set up a v-net how to set up subnets private ip addresses things like that inside of whichever cloud platform you pick uh how do you can create a i would say serverless uh http api this might sound very confusing but as you get into more of the cloud space and if you work with the cloud resume challenge or the azure resume challenge you become very familiar with this but i think uh you know becoming familiar with this concept of serverless in terms of cloud is going to be very very beneficial uh and obviously how to use the cli clies are command line interface tools that you can use to deploy stuff or work with your cloud environment when you're getting started you're going to want to use a lot of like the portal so you go to the website and you click around but that takes a lot a lot of time and when you're actually working in cloud you're expected to be able to manage all these things or do all these things via a command so becoming familiar with the azure cli or the aws cli i'm not 100 sure what they are called so for everything that you can do in the gui make sure you're able to you know how to use that command in your terminal as well i have a bunch of azure cli videos that i did over the pa or live streams that i did over the past month or two i have actually have them in english and spanish if you speak spanish so go check those out uh and yeah i think yeah so get a certification do the resume challenge and really just get hands-on and make sure you erase everything that you don't need in your cloud environment take advantage of the free accounts the free trials or free credits and get hands-on with cloud all right now the last phase would be phase four devops practices oh one thing i forgot to mention for the previous phase is learning content or learning resources i think each platform i know microsoft has microsoft learn and there is just so much free content out there if you go if you sort of google search the microsoft azure certification that you're interested in and find the official microsoft page and if you scroll down you're going to see it gives you all the online free content that we have available for that that's the content that i would recommend you can go for paid courses if you want i don't personally have any ones to recommend i know aws has something similar as well and so does gcp so there's a bunch of free content out there that you can use phase four devops practices now you're going to be introduced to a lot of these as you go through phase like one two and three all of them actually you get introduced to infrastructure as code and cicd which is continuous integration and continuous deployment in phase three when you're learning a cloud platform and you're doing something like the cloud resume challenge or the azure resume challenge or you're doing both right you're introduced to version control git and github in phase two the programming and things like that right so a lot of phase four i believe would be just you know read up a little bit more on these things understand more of the theory if you want to get a certification go ahead but yeah focus on version control infrastructure as code and ci cd and make sure for every single project that you've implemented to have all these things going for those projects as well now if you deploy something in phase one for example a i don't know a free nas uh server or a nex cloud server try to also deploy those with something like terraform and then you don't really have to like deploy it and just keep it going you could also just get rid of it too but yeah getting familiar with infrastructure as code because when you're working in production and actual as a professional you're not going to be manually deploying things you'll be using code to describe what you're going to be deploying right so just get hands-on with that and i think that is absolutely it for for these four phases now you might be overwhelmed right now there is a lot to learn and that's just the reality i've tried to put this in sort of a learning plath or guideline or timeline things like that that makes the most sense but feel free to you know explore whatever you want at any phase anything you want really there are so many new services new cloud services new technologies that come out every single day it's impossible to keep up with all of them there are new languages all the time you can't keep up with all of them just embrace that right i have no idea about a lot of things and yet i'm working in this space like i told you in how to become a cloud engineer in 2020 it isn't necessarily about understanding the new latest and greatest tool it's about understanding your fundamentals and all those skills will translate into whatever you need to pick up right much luck to you please feel free to reach out to me on twitter instagram linkedin or leave a comment here and i will do my absolute best to address any question check out learn2cloud.guide we're we're turning it into a full-on web app that's always going to be free always open source that's going to help you sort of with this guide and also have some hands-on project ideas so you can make sure you follow us on twitter and that'll be launching sometime next year or early next year right uh but yeah much luck to you it is the end of the year so i wish you a happy new years and let's get to learning or i don't know something corny like that i'll see you in the next video

Channel: GPS

Views: 115,918

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Id: vWerXJrNw2g

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021