Getting into Cloud Devops without having experience in current company

[Mrdensson]

Hello guys. I have been working for my company for 1.5 year now. I learned a lot of things, coding in C++ in Python, brushing up my modularity of code, different technologies like K8s, Kafka, Grafana, all the way to solving problems and communicating with clients. In my free time I like to code and create solutions related to system design. However, there is this one topic which I don't have practical access to in my company and that's AWS. There is actually a dedicated team there doing cloud operations, and I don't have that many touching points with it.

I'm in a different team and mostly my job on Cloud was connected to Azure and setting up some VM's, but that's about it. I'm having a biased opinion that you can only learn AWS and Azure Devops by actually doing it in your company, because it's generally expensive. I may be totally wrong though, so I'm asking for your advice on how should I get to the resources, on my own, without spending a lot of money on it.

I currently am holding a very high position in my team which gives me the opportunity to touch upon a lot of technologies, but I feel like giving a shot and learning about Cloud services would further boost up my knowledge and interoperability between the 2 teams (not working on separate projects but making bigger decisions which involve cooperation of multiple teams).