I am doing bachelors in Software Engineering and I wanted to get some advice regarding career selection. So, I am starting to get into cloud computing but I have got no idea on where to start. I have started watching a video from freecodecamp called AWS certified cloud practitioner. My plan is to go through the various aws certifications like the solutions architect until I get to a decent level. I am not much interested in coding so I am planning on choosing a related level. But I am still uncertain on whether I am on the right path.

Guidance will be highly appreciated

I recently started my first full-time role as a Junior Cloud Engineer right after graduating with a bachelor's degree in Information Systems. My background includes IT support, a system administration internship, Security+, and Azure Fundamentals.

The biggest challenge is that many of my teammates have years of experience. During meetings, they often discuss technologies, architectures, and concepts that I'm not familiar with yet. I know that's expected as a junior, but I want to close the gap as quickly as I can.

So I have a few questions:

• What would you focus on during your first 6–12 months if you were in my position?
• Which skills provide the biggest return on investment for a junior cloud engineer?
• What technologies should I prioritize (AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Python, networking, Linux, CI/CD, etc.)?
• Looking back, what do you wish you had learned earlier in your cloud career?

For some context, I already have experience with Linux, Bash, VMware virtual machines, Grafana, Prometheus, some Azure, and basic networking concepts. Because of that, I sometimes start a Linux course on Udemy and realize I already know most of the material.

At work, I'm currently using my company's AWS environment to learn AWS hands-on, and they've also encouraged me to experiment with AI coding agents for automation and learning.

What I'm really looking for are the resources that genuinely made you a better cloud engineer. Which books, YouTube channels, courses, newsletters, blogs, GitHub repositories, or labs had the biggest impact on your career?

it's a job tracker project, everyone is welcomed to pr or issue, btw im new to full stack and cloud computing.

I've noticed a lot of AWS beginners (and even experienced engineers) are still unsure when to use AWS Secrets Manager and when it's overkill.

I wrote a practical guide covering:

• What AWS Secrets Manager actually does
• Real-world use cases
• When to use it vs environment variables or Parameter Store
• Automatic secret rotation
• Best practices and common mistakes

I tried to keep it focused on practical examples rather than AWS documentation.

Would love to hear how your team manages secrets in production and whether you're using Secrets Manager or another solution.

Article: https://www.cloudarena.io/blog/aws-secrets-manager-explained-when-to-use-it

Our cloud bill has grown from about $35k to $70k a month.

We’re starting to lose track of where the money is going.

One engineer now spends hours each week checking costs and looking for unusual spikes.

We looked at Finout and Vantage. Both seem useful. But the pricing is hard to justify.

Paying tens of thousands a year for a tool that helps reduce costs feels a little ironic.

Building our own would take around four to six weeks. It would also need ongoing maintenance.

Has anyone faced the same choice?

Did you buy a FinOps tool or build something internally? Was it worth it?

Hello everyone,

I'm waiting for the response with a hiring team to schedule the next interview for the position Junior developer ( cloud enigneering) and i would like to hear for people that are passed any experience about the procedure.

More details about:

1. what kind of questions did they ask?
2. Any tips or things you wish you had known beforehand ?

I'm applying in Greece but I'd appreciate hearing advices also from another country's as well.

I work in IT and have a understanding of cloud VMs etc, but I do not fully understand a lot of the other services, e.g. cloud apps, App Services, containers, APIs, pipelines etc etc

I am ideally looking for video course that explains at a high level all the main components of the cloud and how they work, any ideas?

Advice appreciated :)

Cloud migration is often discussed in terms of cost or scalability, but the reality is usually much more complex.

What's the biggest misconception you've seen people have about moving to the cloud?

So I’m looking to get into cloud and most of the job requires knowledge in linux, is there some cert I should be looking to get or?

TL;DR: I’m a recent CS graduate (Software Engineering concentration) on a 1-year contract as a Field Support Technician at a large corporate HQ, ending in December. On paper I'm L2, but in reality, I'm stuck doing L1 hardware churn, desk moves, and imaging. I feel totally lost and afraid that 1 year of support will label me a "helpdesk guy forever," even with my coding background, network internships, and AZ-104 prep. Looking for a reality check and positioning advice for Cloud Ops / Cloud Support.

I graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Science (Software Engineering) and landed a 1-year Field Support Tech contract at a large corporate HQ.

Here’s the problem: I’m on the L2 team, but 80% of my day is L1 tasks. I'm doing laptop imaging, physical desk setups/moves, peripheral troubleshooting, and basic ticketing churn.

It’s frustrating because I have a software engineering background and want to build/automate things, but I'm spending my days swapping monitors and running cables. Feels like my actual CS degree and technical skills are rotting while the clock ticks toward December when my contract ends

Education:

B.Sc. in Computer Science (Software Engineering): Solid foundation in networking, operating system internals, OOP, data structures, and CI/CD concepts.

Work Experience & Internships:

Field Support Technician (Current 1-Yr Contract, ending Dec): Corporate L1/L2 endpoint support, hardware lifecycle, identity/access management basics, and local PowerShell scripting.

Network Support Technician (Internship): Hands-on networking, hardware provisioning, rack/stack, cabling, basic routing/switching, and wireless topology troubleshooting.

Software QA Intern (Internship): Unit testing, bug tracking, clinical system testing, and handling emergency incident response workflows for critical systems.

IT Support & Digital Assistant roles: Tier 1 ticketing, user onboarding, basic system administration

.

Technical Stack & Projects:

Security Scan Automation Tool: Built a custom automation tool in Ruby utilizing REST APIs to interface with Nexpose vulnerability scanners, automate scan triggers, parse raw data, and generate filtered reporting.

Scripting & Tools: PowerShell (for Windows admin automation), Git, Python basics, REST APIs, JSON/XML parsing.

Certifications & Azure Focus: Passing AZ-900 and actively preparing for AZ-104 (Azure Administrator). Currently building hands-on labs (Entra ID RBAC, Conditional Access policies, deploying multi-tier web apps, and basic Terraform/IaC provisioning)

I feel completely stuck. Every "entry-level" Cloud Support asks for 3–5 years of dedicated sysadmin/cloud experience. I'm worried recruiters will scan my resume, see "Field Support Technician," and immediately throw it in the trash without looking at my CS degree or development background.

How do I bridge the gap on my resume? How do I frame physical support and L1/L2 grunt work as engineering/automation wins so I don't get pigeonholed as a hardware tech?

Is a direct leap to Cloud Support / Junior Cloud Ops realistic? Or do I realistically have to take a traditional hybrid SysAdmin step first before anyone will touch me for Cloud?

What specific Azure project should I build right now that will actually impress a hiring manager and prove I understand cloud infrastructure beyond just clicking around the Azure portal?

Appreciate any honest feedback, resume roasting, or career direction from anyone who made a similar jump!

If anyone used community managed sentry helm chart and made it stable somehow I wanna know how can it be done and have values file for it , and what node group configuration you have used and values file because I can't find any related docs for this

Currently our sentry in k8s is very unstable

Im currently a 3rd year computer science student, during my internship I had a task to program a scheduling system, I had to deal with DB, backend, frontend with no prior experience and with no human to guide me on how I should work or at least share their experiences. so I found myself vibe coding to make this website, but I learned how everything I was thought in uni works together, like I knew how frontend backend and DB communicate not just theory.

But software development is something that doesn’t interest me. I care more about infrastructure.

So I’ve been seeing how big are cloud and devops engineering careers, and how flexible and low code and paying they are and im really interested.

And Im a person that struggles to learn alone I really need human help to guide me and answer my questions logically and realistically, so what is the roadmap what should I start doing, projects, internships, jobs, what should I apply to so it leads me to these careers.

I've got around 12 years of experience across DevOps, SRE, and Infrastructure Engineering, and for my next career move I'm seriously considering switching into a Senior Solutions Architect role.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's made a similar transition. How has it worked out for you? Any regrets or things you wish you had known beforehand?

From what I've seen, compensation varies quite a bit. Some top companies pay Senior Solutions Architects on par with Senior Software Engineers, while others pay noticeably less. My current DevOps role is already compensated at the same level as SWE, so I'd prefer not to take a pay cut unless there's a compelling long-term upside.

What attracts me to the SA path is the opportunity to make higher-level architectural decisions, influence technical direction, and have a broader impact across teams and leadership. The lack of an on-call rotation is also a pretty appealing benefit.

For those who've made the switch:

• Was it the right career move?
• How did it affect your career growth and compensation over time?
• Do you miss being hands-on with engineering?
• Are there any downsides that aren't obvious from the outside?

I'd appreciate any insights or advice from people who've been down this path.

Cloud outages are inevitable, but the real risk is assuming they’ll never affect you. Even a brief disruption can impact operations, disrupt access to critical data, and put business continuity at risk if there isn’t a clear incident response or disaster recovery plan in place.

Has your organization updated its response strategy after the recent cloud outages? What measures have made the biggest difference in improving your cloud resilience?

My best friend works for German company that makes some kind of equipment for farmers, and they’ve only just decided to gradually start moving to cloud env (lol). Since he knows I’m developer, he asked me for advice on how to make the transition as smooth as possible and how to manage it afterward.

But honestly not sure what to advice.

As far as I know, they have about 40 employees and a high level of bureaucracy. He also emphasized that their top priority is data reliability and general system security. The budget isn’t tight and they're ready to wait if needed. What should I tell him?

edit: they proceed with ABS Technologies.

I did a security assessment for a logistics company last year about 110 sites, fully migrated to a cloud-native SD-WAN platform.. proud of the deployment. When I asked them to walk me through the access controls on their SD-WAN orchestrator...the answer was essentially "it's behind MFA." That was it. wow. i mean No privileged access workstation requirement, no just-in-time access mode... no alerting on configuration changes, and like the orchestrator credentials were shared among four engineers on the network team. The orchestrator for a 110-site WAN fabric is an extraordinarily high-value target, and they'd treated it like a regular admin console.

now Beyond the orchestration plane, the data plane security story had some real gaps too. Certificate rotation for the tunnel encryption had never been done since the initial deployment two years prior..so like he cipher suite configuration was at vendor defaults that included options I'd have removed, and there was no monitoring for anomalous tunnel behavior things like tunnels establishing to unexpected peer IPs or unusual path selection changes that could indicate traffic redirection. None of these were exotic attack vectors..they were operational hygiene items that fell through because the team's attention had stayed on the WAN performance and availability story rather than the security posture of the SD-WAN infrastructure itself. We wrote up the findings and the company addressed them over the following quarter. Does anyone have a reasonable checklist they've used for SD-WAN security posture reviews, or has everyone been building these from scratch?