On-Prem is Fading Away. Here's How to Become a Cloud Convert

It’s hard news to hear. It definitely was for me when I realised in 2020 that Cloud was the way forward. Before I proceed, this isn’t the last nail in the coffin for On-Prem / Physical hardware, and anyone in that space shouldn’t be worried about losing their jobs. Infact, with most countries seeing a labour shortage, this is still the best things have looked for anyone of working age for a very long time.

However, I’ve seen from personal experience that converting your skillset to Cloud is what rakes in the money, and where being a lazy engineer really pays off.

Difficulty #

There’s no point me even going on this ramble without going over how tough the transition is. For context, here was my certification experience in 2020/2021:

CompTIA Network+
City & Guilds Level 4 Network Architecture & Network Security

Yeah, I didn’t have too much back then, did I? At the time, I was a Windows & Network Engineer at one of the top hosting providers in the UK. I definitely enjoyed my time there, but I only worked on relatively small scale environments, albeit at a relatively deep level.

Here’s where I got to in April 2022:

CompTIA Network+ (Renewed)
AWS Solutions Architect - Associate
Hashicorp Certified Terraform Associate

Even though it’s just two extra certs, it was a good bit of work. In total, it was about 50 hours labbing, and 80 hours studying for both certs combined. For me, it was a complete mental shift from making changes manually to hardware you could physically see, to essentially communicating with API’s for a significant part of the day.

It’s a big change to how you work for sure, but people with good underlying hardware and OS knowledge are surprisingly hard to find in the Cloud Support space making it quite easy for people like us to put our best foot forward.

Hopefully by this time in 2023, here’s how I’ll look, just to show you a hopeful progression path to becoming a senior engineer / team leader:

CompTIA Network+
AWS Solutions Architect - Associate
AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate
AWS Developer - Associate
Hashicorp Certified Terraform Associate
ITIL 4 Foundation
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (By EOY 2023)

It’s definitely a larger list, but all of those certs essentially will build on what I’ve already learned in previous certs and job experience, so it’s not as large a leap as it initially looks. Realistically, if you’re reading this and you think you have the same start point as I did, you’ll likely be able to get to where I want to be in 2023 even quicker. If you think about it in hours rather than months or years, you’ll be able to set a more accurate target than what you see as reference points online.

Automation #

Now that we’ve got the fluff sorted, let’s dive into the good stuff.

Automation is the number one way you move away from the older ways of SysAdmin work and closer to being able to wear the DevOps hat with pride. As a start, I’d always recommend learning the more agnostic services like Terraform and Pulumi . Then, if you have a specific provider in mind, you can learn them in conjunction with certs like AWS SysOps Administrator or Microsoft Azure Administrator. For AWS, you’ll want to look into CloudFormation, and ARM will be your best friend for Azure.

If you’re interested in Terraform, I’ve got a guide on using Terraform Modules that will hopefully help you learn how to implement re-usable code. It took me a good while to get used to how they work, so fingers crossed I can save you the time. I’d also recommend checking out Bryan Krausen’s practice exams on Udemy if you’ve got an account with your Organization. They’re the only ones I’ve seen so far that actually hit the mark with how the questions are worded. Combining that with Ned Bellevance’s Certfied Associate Prep Guide and you’ll smash that cert in no time!

Services as a Service #

I kid with the title on this section, but AWS and Azure genuinely do offer quite a lot of Services that you otherwise would just run on instances. To explain all of these would take weeks, but in short, if a service exists, AWS and Azure likely have their own spin on it. Take ElasticSearch for instance, you have Elastic on Azure and Amazon Opensearch for AWS. If you’re originally a DBA, you’ll love to get your teeth into Amazon Aurora for MySQL. The truth is, for whatever you currently specialise in, most Cloud Providers likely provide it with their own control system and orders of magnitude better performance and reliability than any top team could manage with On-Prem tools.

Thankfully, your MySQL Database Administration cert isn’t useless now since almost none of these services will have anything different in the applications themselves.

Networking: It Does (not) Get Easier. #

If you had to spend weeks learning subnetting like I did, maybe you hoped Networking would be easier while working in the Cloud. Well… it does! In most cases. Like Apple’s ideology, with both AWS and Azure, you often hear the statements “It just works” and “No more configuration needed” in talks and various commercial videos. What we see in reality is “It just works” with the huge asterisk “until it doesn’t”. The amount of times I’ve got lost in various Cloud consoles trying to fix a network fault in my relatively short time working is insane compared to a simple “show run” in Cisco’s gear.

This is worst part I’ve seen so far in my cloud journey, but I still mention it here because in your day-to-day, it’s so much better. Gone are the huge concerns over address spaces overlapping, or worrying about if your new airgapped network is really airgapped, or even if your connection tests are failing because there’s something wrong with your test box. Trust me when I say that cloud providers have thought of this, and really made it foolproof. In AWS, you can simulate connections across your environment to and from anything, get flow logs in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and check your Security Groups with quite good visibility.

From personal experience, I’ve seen that anyone with a networking cert wanting to get into cloud tech will be welcomed with open arms.

Monitoring is finally usable! #

Nagios. That word alone is enough to make me shudder. If you’ve used Nagios to any degree, you’ll know how painful it can be to configure if you want any deeper application monitoring. With AWS and Azure however, that concern is relatively a thing of the past. With both providers, you can grab logs from any location on your VM’s and alert if certain patterns are found. No longer are you having to deal with weird RegEx strings or configuring timeout periods manually with proprietary and undocumented parameters.

This alone is what motivated me to get solid monitoring implemented in my lab environment. The great thing is, AWS works with Grafana so well, there’s Pre-Built dashboards that work wonders right out of the gate!

To conclude, becoming a Cloud Convert is a lot easier, and comes with a lot more benefits than you’d think. There’s the money, benefits of better automation and the fact that it’s much easier to work remotely. It’s a no brainer really!

If you’re already on this journey and want to find your potential forever home, fire me an email at [email protected]. I’m not a recruiter, but my place is always taking people in and I’d love to hear from you.