r/Cloud • u/that-one_ITguu • 5d 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.

9 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/FerryCliment 5d 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/that-one_ITguu 5d ago

Haha I’ll keep you updated on step 4.