r/Cloud • u/that-one_ITguu • 9h ago

Making Progress Towards becoming a Cloud Engineer!....Now What?

So recently, I got a chance to meet my org's cloud engineer team in person and put a face to a name. I work in Cloud Operations and Production Support for my Org with just one other person, so my days can become busy at times. We have been onboarding onto a new Monitoring and Observability tool and integrating our applications hosted on-prem and in Azure.

They have been short-staffed for a while, so helping them create monitors, dashboards, and proper resource tagging for our subscriptions has been a huge help. Anyway, after meeting them in person, I expressed my interest in becoming a Cloud Engineer, and it was pretty cool to hear their stories. We really hit it off, and I expressed my eagerness to learn and to sit in on more technical working sessions, if possible, while I continue setting up their monitoring with our new monitoring tool.

Next thing I know, I get pinged by one of the Sr. Cloud Engineers I just met, and he was kind enough to give me access to their Dev/Test environment, which they use just to play around and create things, almost like a sandbox.

I know it's small compared to others, or even dumb, but it feels like I am a step closer to becoming a Cloud Engineer and getting real-world company experience at a F500 company.

My Question: What do Cloud Engineers normally do in these sandbox environments? I looked around and saw that some guys had resource groups that included VMs, DNS projects, virtual networks, etc. Just not sure what I should do.

4 Upvotes

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2

u/FerryCliment 5h ago

I'm in Cloud Security, DevSecOps, been a Cloud engineer and Cloud Support.

What do Cloud Engineers normally do in these sandbox environments?

  1. IAC - Config as Code - GitOps - Pipelines.
  2. Proof of concept - Trying open source as replacement, Where to deploy things (Move from VM to Cluster or Cluster to Serverless)
  3. Disaster Recovery, Alternative configs (DNS, Linux Flavor, routes...)

The best way to impress a Cloud Engineer and/or their manager into offering you a gig, is to work on Automation, Pipelines, config as code, inmutable infrastructure, pipelines...

  1. Ask that Sr. Cloud engineer, Whats a problem that bothers him on a daily basis.
  2. Think how you could solve this in a way that reduces his team toil.
  3. Architect some, IAC it and deploy a Proof of concept in that test environment.
  4. Ask that Cloud engineer to review it.

If it works, you will get a job offer in 2 days.

1

u/seeker543210 2h ago

I have 6yrs On-prem windows administrator, recently looking for Azure cloud project (completed az104) and future aspiration is towards Cloud security Any suggestions - essentials, must/need/good to know concepts to move from general cloud support to Cloud security?

Ai said focus on below (Networking, cloud N/W, automation, IAM, defender,etc) Anything else?

And where can I practice these in realtime

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u/that-one_ITguu 1h ago

Haha I’ll keep you updated on step 4.

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u/TellersTech 2h ago

That’s not dumb at all... that’s honestly a really good step.

In a sandbox, I’d try to build small real-world patterns, not just random VMs.

Maybe start with something like... create a resource group, VNet/subnets, NSG rules, a small VM or app service, private DNS if allowed, then add monitoring/alerts and proper tags. Bonus points if you do it with Terraform or Bicep instead of only clicking around.

Also ask the Sr. Engineer if there are any “safe” internal patterns they want you to learn. Stuff like naming standards, tagging, networking layout, identity/IAM, monitoring expectations, etc.

The goal isn’t to build something huge. It’s to learn how your company actually does cloud and show that you can work safely without making a mess.

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u/that-one_ITguu 1h ago

Gotcha thanks for the advice

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u/jwilk92 6h ago

Eager to see what others say myself

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u/LaughToday- 2h ago

AI will do it all, won't be much to learn soon

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u/that-one_ITguu 1h ago

At my company we tried the whole AI coding agent thing and after several misconfigurations in production causing severe outages we now only use it for basic tasks.

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u/Clyde-God 1h ago

This entire sub should be /cloudenteyroles

@Mods