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YOUR LEARNING PATH / 8 STAGES

Cloud Engineer

Design, deploy, and run workloads on the public cloud.

Learn · build · explain

The path, stage by stage.

8 stages

Open a stage for skills, a project, and references. Mark it complete when you can explain what you built and why.

  1. 01Cloud Fundamentals & a Cloud Account4 focus areas · 2 resources

    Understand the cloud model, then get hands-on in a free-tier account immediately.

    What to learn

    • IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS, regions & availability zones
    • Shared-responsibility model & the global backbone
    • Billing, budgets, and free-tier guardrails
    • Pick ONE primary cloud (AWS is the safest first job market)

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    Create a free-tier account, set a billing alarm, and launch + terminate a single VM.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

  2. 02Linux, Networking & DNS4 focus areas · 2 resources

    Cloud is rented Linux on someone else's network. These fundamentals never stop paying off.

    What to learn

    • Linux CLI, SSH, package management
    • TCP/IP, subnets/CIDR, routing, NAT
    • DNS records (A, CNAME, MX) and TLS/SSL
    • HTTP, load balancing, and CDNs

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    SSH into a cloud VM, install a web server, and serve a page over HTTPS with a real domain.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

  3. 03Core Cloud Services4 focus areas · 2 resources

    The bread-and-butter building blocks you'll use on almost every project.

    What to learn

    • Compute: VMs + autoscaling (EC2/Compute Engine)
    • Storage: object (S3/GCS) + block + lifecycle policies
    • Databases: managed SQL + NoSQL (RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB)
    • Networking: VPC, subnets, security groups, load balancers

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    Build a 3-tier app: load balancer → autoscaling compute → managed database.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

  4. 04Identity, Security & Compliance4 focus areas · 2 resources

    IAM mistakes cause most cloud breaches. Get least-privilege right early.

    What to learn

    • IAM: users, roles, policies, federation, least privilege
    • Encryption at rest & in transit, KMS / Secret managers
    • Network security: security groups, NACLs, WAF
    • Logging & audit (CloudTrail), basic compliance concepts

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    Replace any long-lived keys in your app with an IAM role and store secrets in a secret manager.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

  5. 05Infrastructure as Code4 focus areas · 2 resources

    Real cloud teams never click — they describe infrastructure in code.

    What to learn

    • Terraform / OpenTofu (cloud-agnostic, most hireable)
    • Cloud-native IaC (CloudFormation / CDK / Bicep)
    • Modules, remote state, and environments
    • CI for infra: plan on PR, apply on merge

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    Recreate your 3-tier app entirely in Terraform/OpenTofu — no console clicks.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

  6. 06Serverless & Event-Driven Architecture4 focus areas · 2 resources

    Serverless is the default for new cloud-native workloads — and great for portfolios.

    What to learn

    • Functions (Lambda / Cloud Functions) & triggers
    • API Gateway, queues (SQS), pub/sub & event buses
    • Managed containers (Fargate / Cloud Run)
    • Cold starts, idempotency, and observability for serverless

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    Build an event-driven image-resize pipeline: upload → queue → function → store.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

  7. 07FinOps, Reliability & Operations4 focus areas · 2 resources

    Saving money and keeping things up are what makes a cloud engineer trusted.

    What to learn

    • Cost analysis, tagging, rightsizing & savings plans
    • Monitoring & alerting (CloudWatch / Cloud Monitoring)
    • Backups, multi-AZ, disaster recovery basics
    • FinOps culture: showback/chargeback, budgets

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    Run a cost report on your account, find the top spender, and cut it with rightsizing or a budget.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

  8. 08Certify & Build a Portfolio4 focus areas · 2 resources

    For cloud roles, a foundational cert + 2–3 real projects beats a long resume.

    What to learn

    • Target an associate cert (AWS SAA / GCP ACE / AZ-104)
    • Write up your projects with architecture diagrams
    • Practice cost/architecture trade-off explanations
    • Contribute IaC modules to GitHub

    Put it into practice

    Your build

    Publish 2 documented cloud projects on GitHub with diagrams, IaC, and a short write-up each.

    Keep notes on the setup, result, and one trade-off you made.

    Resources & documentation

Extend the foundations

Ideas to connect as you go.

Return to these themes as the core skills become familiar.

Explore another direction.

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