How to get started as a Cloud Engineer

what's up everybody my name is nick i'm a cloud security engineer based out of central florida right here in the united states and in this video i'm going to be answering a question that i received from a subscriber last week and let's go ahead and jump into that question the subscriber as had commented on a video that i posted last week basically saying this video came out at the right time thank you for this but i'm wondering if you could do a video on the different subsets in cloud engineering because it seems like you have to know everything risk management linux physical and cloud networking troubleshooting python and a host of other languages i feel like my brain is going to explode lol if you're liking this video already be sure to smash the like button and hit the subscribe button as well hitting the like button uh helps the youtube algorithm get this content out to other people so you're helping me help other people which is also helping you because you're helping other people and everyone's being helped so be sure to hit the like button and hitting the subscribe button only helps you because you're going to be getting more content just like this so you're helping everybody go ahead and hit those buttons back to the video listen as i'm not sure what your name is but we're going to call you that i totally get it when i first started in cloud engineering i felt the exact same way for those of you who don't know my background i started out before going into cloud security i started out as an i.t systems engineer or systems administrator basically jack of all trade kind of guy you know i was able to write scripts manage servers deal with some networking issues run the help desk do some security uh you know standing up firewalls for networks and and remediating any malware on local workstations and that sort of thing running backups the typical responsibilities you would think of for an it admin in a local business environment right when i decided i wanted to specialize in cloud security i started pursuing aws because the job that i had just joined that was all they built their their applications in and so i i wanted to learn that really well and i learned about this thing called devops which was like mind-blowing it basically felt like these were wizards on the computer and i wanted to be one of those guys but then i was also so attracted to cyber security i was pursuing my degree in that so i thought wow how cool to know security and devops and be this like it guru that knows the cloud and security and i began pursuing it and so i would ask questions with these devops engineers i try to get lunch with them and say hey how did you get to this point how did you understand this and they basically said they got certified and they started teaching me about services and you know how to learn how to how to build things in the cloud and and they told me which certifications they were pursuing and you know in which sequences they pursued them and how they were able to advance in their career to become these wizards in the cloud and so i followed in their footsteps i started pursuing them and that's how i got my aws solution architect associate certification all right so let's go ahead and jump right into it in order for you to become a cloud engineer we're just talking you are the jack of all trades so to speak for the cloud these are the things you're going to want to know how to do you're going to want to know virtualization now basically everything that runs in the cloud is not something you can touch unless you run in a private cloud environment that your organization has built or maybe you're in one of those um community cloud ecosystems where your organization or maybe you run a community cloud with other organizations or other individuals you're probably racking stacking them and you're running the software and the virtualization hypervisors et cetera et cetera sure you got that but if you're talking about public cloud this is aws azure gcp alibaba cloud whatever something like that and basically anything that's public cloud that's listed in the gartner uh uh four quadrant for cloud those are going to be virtual environments that you're not going to have tangible access to it's something that is managed by another organization like amazon so let's talk about amazon if i'm trying to become a cloud engineer for amazon i need to know virtualization well what is that that's like your vmware right understanding what a virtual machine is and how it works how does a virtual machine interact with the underlying hypervisor and the underlying bare metal machine like you know an opera like like your laptop let's say you're running a virtual machine on your laptop you have you're going to have your your workstation you're going to have the software that manages the virtual machines then you're going to have your virtual machine or your virtual box which is basically another computer inside your computer it's going to be borrowing resources from the workstation or from the server so understand that relationship other things you're going to want to know a little bit more about are containers which kind of takes that virtual machine and strips down a couple layers of it takes away the operating system and just gives you the application so the application is running on top of your uh workstation and using your workstation's resources to run the application and then server list goes even further into that but we don't need to get into the weeds on that these are some things that i would recommend understand virtualization second thing you're going to want to know how to do or at least have some good understanding of is networking you can't really go into the cloud without understanding what ip addresses are subnets subnet ranges firewalls just general pretty basic networking terminology and the reason why is because even if you're going in there to just play around with systems you're going to need to understand how the systems communicate with each other within your cloud environment but then there's many times where you're going to have these systems these virtual machines or serverless applications interacting with stuff in your office or maybe a storage solution or maybe another cloud you're just going to have to know how to get these systems to communicate with each other so it's a good idea to understand your basic networking principles by no means you need to be like a cisco ccna or anything like that if you are it's certainly going to help you but you don't have to be i i'm not a cisco guru i didn't go after any cisco certifications i have my networking plus certification and that's it that's all i have before jumping into the cloud so if you want to be a cloud engineer make sure you understand networking fundamentals all right so the third thing you're going to want to know how to do is be able to write or interact within like a scripting environment so typically this is going to be bash or powershell kind of pick your flavor of choice and stick with it learn that one really well and then if you happen to need to know the other one you can go that route for me in particular i'm a mac and linux person so naturally i play with bash and i play with the terminal environment more than i would a powershell environment because i don't use windows very much but if you come from a windows environment if that's what your organization uses i would go ahead and start learning powershell there are some similarities there within the syntax but there are some very distinct differences too i can't speak to them in in depth because i don't know powershell that well but there are many people who do learn both because they play in both environments um so you know pick one or pick both and go for that because that's going to be really helpful and let me tell you why understanding the powershell or bash scripting languages is going to obviously help you write scripts which will help you deploy things automatically in the cloud these are things that a general cloud engineer would be doing the other thing is you may need to be using the cli versus the actual gui and the cloud portal so typically when you log into a public cloud environment you'll sign in with your account and you can click around and deploy ec2 instances or virtual machines and you can stand up vpcs or virtual networks or whatever right you can do things in the environment however typically you can do things way faster if you do it within your terminal or your powershell window uh you can also do things kind of repetitively you can automate things if you're writing scripts and uh you know interacting with your cloud accounts that way so it's extremely helpful to understand these uh ways of interacting with the cloud so it's extremely helpful for you to understand these ways of interacting with the cloud so i do recommend that you understand powershell or bash and how to play around with the cloud environment using those two options okay so number four on my list is understand your organizational needs so like i told you earlier and the organization that i was working at at the time when i started playing around in the cloud they were all about aws they didn't do anything with azure gcp wasn't even in question it was all aws so naturally being that i wanted to learn the cloud and lean on the resources and the people that i was working with kind of rubbing shoulders with i said i'm gonna go and get aws certified so i learned about aws services i didn't care about anything else at the time i just wanted to know how do you stand up solutions in aws uh for example like how do i build a website you know i built a wordpress website using ec2 instances and then i did the same thing in a server-less environment i stripped it down i ended up creating flat files and hosting it and an s3 bucket and just having a heyday out of it it was a really cool lab and i did this with other things as well so i recommend that you do that play around build things get creative find projects on the internet because there's thousands of them on github stack overflow and medium like just find a resource and go out there and try to replicate it dig into the online resources ask questions lean on other people post comments in the video like like you know mr a.s or miss as did here last week you want to make sure that you're interacting with people and trying to poke and get your questions answered so that you can learn don't let your lack of knowledge hinder you from moving forward so number four was to understand your organization's cloud services and their needs and begin pursuing that number five on this list is understand architectural design and architectural components so one thing that is so so big doesn't matter which cloud vendor you end up going for is the concept of high availability developing highly available architectures there's a whole lot of documentation on this if you go to any of the public cloud vendors websites like aws gcp azure i'll post links in the description below where you can learn more about this but you want to understand these architectural design components regardless of where you end up in your cloud career if you're going to be a cloud generalist and engineer understanding these things will help you communicate with architects that design these solutions in the cloud it'll also help you uh be an advisor to developers and other individuals who are collaborating with you in the cloud so make sure that you're learning it you don't have to be an expert by any means but if you've read it you understand some fundamental concepts enough to hold the conversation with other people that's plenty that's excellent i love people that do that i love working with people that do that because i know that i can have an educated conversation with somebody else who is thinking on the same lines of me we're all focused on making sure that our systems our applications are staying up as much as possible you know ideally you know 100 of the time but obviously that's very very difficult to achieve but so we want to make sure that the systems and the services are going to be up um as much as possible so that's the goal all right that about wraps up this video i hope this was super helpful if you have any questions please post them down in the comment section below i love hearing from all of you and i'm more than happy to answer any questions that you have if i don't know it i am looking to bring in other people into this channel in the future so that would be a great idea to you know stimulate the conversation bring in other experts to speak on these points that i don't know about so well and get your questions answered so let me know what your questions are in the comment section below be sure to smash the like button and also subscribe to this channel for more content just like this on cloud cloud security cyber security and anything else you might be interested within the it world so all right see ya

Channel: Nicolas Moy

Views: 43,718

Keywords: how to become a cloud engineer, cloud engineer, cloud computing, cloud engineer interview questions, cloud engineer salary, aws engineer, azure cloud engineer, aws cloud engineer, cloud engineer skills

Id: jYk2EhOCyJ0

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021