Cloud Engineer Secrets

Intro to Cloud Engineer Secrets

A cloud engineer differs from a traditional system administrator. The system administrator works with on premises systems, often with the hardware itself. However, a cloud engineer rarely if ever interacts with systems directly. They work with consoles, API's and scripts to manage the infrastructure. This and other cloud engineer secrets sets them apart from the system administrator.

Infrastructure as Software

In the cloud you should think of systems as software. Because of this, you have advantages over traditional systems. Two examples include versioning and scripting.

Cloud Engineer Secrets – Versioning

Versioning allows you to snapshot your system, make changes, test them and then roll back to a previous state if needed. Even better, these experiments run parallel to your production systems. Meaning, No investment in a secondary infrastructure required.

When you complete your experiments promote the new version to production. Do your promotions with scripts to keep them simple and consistent.

Cloud Engineer Secrets – Scripting

Whether you use Linux Shell or PowerShell, building scripts makes it easier for you to manage your cloud infrastructure. The AWS Cloud platform provides a command line interface to execute commands. This interface enables you to create, update, read or delete configurations.

You can wrap these commands in your favorite scripting language. Therefore, you can lean on your previous experience and build scripting tools that make it easy to manage your infrastructure.

Over time, your library of scripts grows into a healthy collection.

Self Documenting

In addition to your library of scripts cloud environments provide integrated documentation. So, as you build your systems the configuration documentation updates automatically. Through the Console or CLI you review real time configurations; no more worrying that what you see is out of date.

This makes auditing and debugging simple.

Faster Procurement

Two factors speed procurement when it comes to cloud resources. The primary factor, lower cost of incremental expansion, means acquiring additional resources doesn't require large expense approvals.

The second factor, no physical delivery requirements, means once approved, resources come online in minutes rather than days. This means, you can request a new server and have it ready to go in half an hour. No shipping, receiving, installation or setup required.

How Cloud Engineer Secrets Help You

These secrets transform how you operate. Therefore, the logistics of physical systems no longer land on your plate. The delay in procuring system resources disappears. You no longer need to spend time documenting system configuration only to have it go stale within a week.

In short, you now focus on building systems and improving them rather than debugging and documenting them.

Getting Started

If you want to start building experience with Cloud Technology nothing works better than tackling a project. In my book AWS Essentials I walk you through an actual infrastructure project. You will construct the infrastructure to host a scalable, high performing, reliable and secure web farm.

I demonstrate seven core technologies and you perform exercises that teach you the skills you need and actually construct real infrastructure with Amazon's cloud platform.

Hands on training helps you integrate these cloud engineer secrets into your experience and expertise.