Introduction
Welcome to the world of cloud development! As a new engineer, you’ll have many opportunities and responsibilities. First, You need to learn the basic skills that will help you succeed in your career as a developer.
For this article, We asked our experienced cloud engineers how they started their career in cloud computing and what advice and tips they can give to freshly graduated cloud engineers eager to start a successful career in cloud development.
The goal here is not to make things too difficult for yourself but rather to give you an easy-to-understand overview of how others have started their first few months as cloud developers.
1. Learn Linux
The first technical skill that you need to have a good knowledge of is Linux. This is because everything is run on Linux for the most part, moreover, Amazon Web Services, Apache CloudStack, Rackspace, Google Cloud Platform, and OpenStack all run Linux and this is because Linux is the most available and reliable solution for cloud-based systems with critical workloads in data centers.
2. Learn Python
Python is a very popular programming language that has a wide variety of libraries, which makes it very useful in the cloud development world. It’s easy to learn and is used by many big companies like Google, NASA, and many others.
The best way to get started with Python is by learning how to program with it on your own or through an online course like Code Academy or Treehouse. Once you’ve learned how to program in Python there are many great resources available online that can help you advance your career as an engineer!
3. Learn AWS (or another cloud provider)
If you’re just starting out, AWS is a great place to start. It’s extremely popular and has a well-established ecosystem of tools and services that can help you get your job done quickly. You’ll also love the fact that AWS has a free tier (that’s $0/month), so you can try it out without spending any money upfront.
If this doesn’t sound like enough for you—or if it sounds too good to be true—there are other cloud providers with similarly generous free tiers: Google Cloud Platform offers $300 worth of credit per month with no upfront cost.
4. Become familiar with DevOps culture
One of the most important things you can do to prepare for your career as a cloud developer is to become familiar with DevOps.
It’s often misunderstood and undervalued as an “approach” or “culture,” but it’s actually much more than that. DevOps is about collaboration between development and operations teams to improve efficiency and reduce waste in software development processes by automating everything (from deployments to testing), creating standardized workflows across multiple teams, and keeping track of changes through automated infrastructure monitoring tools like Datadog or Prometheus (or similar), setting up environments so they’re ready when needed without requiring manual configuration from someone in either department—all while still maintaining flexibility for changing requirements without disrupting production services!
5. Understand Virtualization, Containers, and Orchestration
Virtualization is the act of creating a virtual machine (VM) and it’s the main way that you can run multiple operating systems on a single hardware platform.
Docker and Kubernetes are essential tools to learn, they really simplify how you develop and deploy your code, and run your application. Shipping your application into a container makes deployment and scaling smooth and drives automation. It makes DevOps easy and makes your production environment robust.
- Learn and use Docker
Docker is a containerization tool that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers. It is valuable to start learning docker, it will simplify how you develop and deploy your code as well as your applications in production environments.
- Use Kubernetes for infrastructure management
Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that helps you manage your cloud applications by providing an API for scheduling tasks and managing resources like CPU cores, memory, or disk space across multiple nodes (computers). It also manages container lifecycles so you don’t need to worry about spinning up instances manually every time you want to run a task or process on a machine – everything takes care of itself!
There are so many resources that help you to learn Docker and Kubernetes. the most popular ones are Udemy, Coursera, and cloud-native.
6. Get familiar with Networking
Networking is a critical skill for any ops engineer, but it’s even more important if you’re working in the cloud. Cloud developers must be able to understand how networking works and how it fits into the broader software engineering workflow.
Understanding the OSI model is essential for understanding how networks function. The OSI model describes seven layers of abstraction that provide a mapping between data packets and higher-level protocols (e.g., TCP/IP).
7. IAC (infrastructure as code)
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes.
With IaC, configuration files are created that contain your infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. It also ensures that you provide the same environment every time.
There are many different ways to do this, but they all start with creating a configuration file. This configuration file can be written in any of the following tools:
- Terraform – a language that allows you to describe the state of your infrastructure and automate its deployment. You can then access this state by looking at your terraform state file and using it as input for other tools like Ansible or Chef.
- Cloud Formation – is another tool that allows you to create virtual machines (VMs) on EC2 instances in the cloud using templates. You can also use Cloud Formation to create new EC2 instances from templates, which makes it very easy to automate large-scale deployments with little human involvement.
- ARM Templates – are a form of infrastructure as code, a concept where you define the infrastructure that needs to be deployed. ARM templates use declarative syntax, meaning you determine the resources for Azure to deploy without specifying how the resources are created.
8. Learn how to use the command line and scripting languages
A command line is a powerful tool for automating tasks, and it’s also a great way to learn how your computer works. Learning the command line can help you become more efficient and productive at work, as well as give you insight into what makes different pieces of software behave in certain ways.
The first step is to think about what kinds of things you want to automate with your scripts or programs—you might want something that runs every day when certain events happen (like sending an email when someone signs up for our product), or something that runs only once and then exits gracefully (like creating an email list). Once we’ve decided on our ideal script, we’ll need to know how it should be structured so it can run correctly without any problems later down the road.
9. Bonus Tips!
You may feel overwhelmed at first, and you should not because You don’t have to do all of these things at once. what we recommend is to do as much as possible in the first month or two of employment—and then keep doing what makes sense for your specific situation and goals over time.
If something isn’t working out, change it so that it does! You don’t need a perfect set-up right away; just start moving towards something better one step at a time!
10. Other simple things, but they will make you stand out from all other newbies
- Improve your English as much as possible.
This may be obvious for some people, having a good level in English makes the learning process easier, because almost all the excellent learning materials are taught in the English language so English will allow you to broaden your references. If you want to start a career in a big firm and take on international projects you definitely need to have an easy command of the English language.
- Create your own Github account
GitHub is an online software development platform used for storing, tracking, and collaborating on software projects. It enables developers to upload their own code files and to collaborate with fellow developers on open-source projects. GitHub also serves as a social networking site for a Powerful IT Community that can openly network, collaborate, and pitch their work.
Here are a few GitHub links that help you to help you get started with GitHub:
- Network with other developers.
There are millions of other developers who want to learn, share their knowledge, and connect with other developers out there, all you have to join this community and start by cultivating a valuable relationship with them based on mutual value exchange. The more you broaden your professional network circle, the more opportunities will present themselves to you. Linkedin, GitHub, Reddit, Stack overflow, and WhatsApp groups are great social networks to connect with other fellow cloud engineers all over the world. Also, You can participate for free in virtual events like hashicorp
Last but not least, don’t forget to take any opportunity to learn, for example, you can participate in hackathons and programming challenges.
Finally, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, as Theodore Roosevelt said “ the only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything”
Conclusion
That’s it! These are just 10 easy tips for becoming a cloud developer. Now you have some great resources to help you get started. If you need to brush up on any of these topics, I recommend checking out the books we mentioned above or simply going online and looking around for more information.
