Getting started on the cloud journey

The hardest thing about getting started is getting started. Trying out new things and leaving out of the comfort zone is always challenging. If you aspire to add your skills to cloud space, then this guide will give you direction on the way.

# Introduction

Coming up with the broad topic about the cloud? I would say it’s someone else’s computer. Cloud computing is the delivery of services via a network of remote someone’s computers. It’s being accessed via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.

whatever you wanna learn first know the reason why you are trying to pursue it. Having said that a basic understanding of insights and benefits of the particular domain can give you a way to the bigger scope of the idea. Let’s jump into the topic.

Will you rather pay a bill according to your usage of electricity or construct a hydro project for it? I forget about the maintenance cost and employees too. The short and sweet answer is you will choose the first one, which models work with cloud computing.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel starting from scratch. Cloud gives you the whole robust platform for your requirements. Cost is a big concern. Cloud computing minimizes it with minimal cost than setting up your own data center.

What about disaster recovery, data backup, and physical & software security? It takes a bunch of effort and manpower to maintain the data center. In cloud computing, you don’t have to spend the time for provision. You can order servers, stop them, and experiment. Migration towards the cloud can also reduce your costs. It drives business profitability at a global scale.

# Starting your cloud journey

No matter your background, you can still scale up your cloud skills in your career. Cloud skills collab with many roles either tech or non-tech. Lots of people jump into the cloud and practice a lot of services. It’s okay but I don’t recommend it in such a way to learn. I prefer anyone to lay down the fundamentals before grabbing into cloud computing.

The main concepts of cloud computing are pretty similar across all vendors. New sugar-coated stuff might come and go but fundamentals always stay up there. Having strong foundations on these will not help only in the cloud but also others. Make sure your brush it up well enough. You must have the eagerness to take on new challenges and adapt according to the scene too with its context.

As we are the consumer, there are public cloud providers. Meanwhile, in this guide, I have skipped deployment models, types, and many more. Once you have a strong background in the foundations, it is time to pick up the cloud providers.

You can choose any of them, I prefer you to choose AWS. It’s one of the biggest cloud providers and dominated the cloud market. It has huge opportunities too. The majority of the fortune companies like Netflix, Snapchat, and Airbnb used AWS. It’s all up to you to choose.

There is one more thing that needs to be added on. Knowing the core services gives you a wider view of cloud platforms. Try to understand the core service working mechanism. Eg. understand how the cron job might be relatable to serverless or how it works under the hood. How does virtualization work? How virtual machine images are being published on their vendor’s market? Understanding might take you way further on your skills rather than using them only.

# First hour on AWS

You can access AWS in many ways, it doesn’t have to be on the web console. Try out with other tools too

SDK with your programming language
IDE
Infrastructure as code(prefer you to spin up via terraform)

Be aware of the right region whenever you are using the services too. You might be lost out to come back again with used services due to another region. Aware of the bills here. Your used microservices on the services might affect the services region too. It affects the following one.

Latency
Compliance and data privacy laws
AWS services availability
AWS Services pricing model

Don’t forget to use the developer support plan. If you are experimenting with AWS, I highly recommend it. You can get lots of support plans on the different levels of services.

For security purposes, rotate credentials regularly with a strong password. Also, grant out the least privileges associated with IAM policies, security groups, and everywhere. And guess what, start building on AWS.

AWS is a big toolbox you might be overwhelmed by how huge it is, and the same goes with other vendors too. I will be sharing about good resources that can enhance to use of the aws resources and learn them.