This quote from an old David Gerrold SciFi novel is very relevant today in regards to coming from a traditional sysadmin background and transitioning into cloud roles.
There is so much to learn, but when it really gets down to brass tacks, while a good chunk of your knowledge will transfer over, there is just so much involved that is brand new.
Well, a lot of concepts will carry over from legacy to cloud. Subnetting hasn’t changed, what a VM or Docker container is hasn’t changed, storage is storage, and a firewall is a firewall. Now the tools you use to set all that up - that’s the difference.
Instead of having to maintain all that physical infrastructure, there are tons and tons of tools at your disposal now to do all this virtually. Its kind of mind blowing when you take a step back and just try to grasp everything you have available now.
Being relatively new to cloud ops, I’ll admit that there’s a lot I don’t know yet. I think the most challenging parts for me right now aren’t learning the web consoles and where everything is in them - that’s easy. Its things like CloudFormation/Azure Resource templates and the AWS and Azure CLIs that I just don’t yet have enough experience with.
It is somewhat initially intimidating when you look at all you have to learn just to be competitive in the industry and make yourself marketable to be completely honest. You look at the list of hundreds and hundreds of tools in use today and then look at DevOps job listings and their requirements and think “Wow - where do I even start?” I know I’m really late to the game at this point, but that was my initial thoughts earlier this year.
Well for starters, I hopped right into AWS Certified Cloud Practicioner (CLF-C01) - took a couple weeks of study and passed it. Sure its a super basic cert, but hey, its a start. A cloud project started up at work which really only got the very tip of my toes wet with Azure when I was hoping it would go a lot deeper, but eventually I was able to get some instructor led AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate training going through a partnership program. After taking that and going through the A Cloud Guru course for it, passed that test too. I fit in a bit of Ansible basics learning in between the two tests, you can find my test playbooks to set up a K3S and Docker Swarm cluster for my homelab on my Github repo for it.
Problem is I can’t really get an opportunity to use those skills in migrating anything to Azure. No spend allocation/budget and things in Azure are so locked down you really can’t deploy anything without going through months and months and months of red tape to deploy something that’s barely accessable from the internal network only.
Keep learning is my goal. Never stop learning - can’t afford not to when there’s so much stuff to learn. I have enough on my list at the moment to keep me busy for a while: