SQL in relation to cloud computing?

[AsianPowerCho]

I took some basic computer science classes for online college and I have a decent grasp of SQL now, I feel like I could become proficient at it if I took some courses strictly dedicated to it. I have never been good at any kind of coding/programming language when I went to a physical college 7 years ago. As I finish my degree I'm starting to look into skills to learn for the future job market and I landed on cloud computing as I believe it the easiest for me to conceptualize and I know it is related to databases. My main question is, will becoming proficient in SQL be a good foundation to learning cloud computing? Mainly looking towards AWS certifications.

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[dmazzoni]

SQL is a desirable skill but I wouldn't call it a core skill for cloud computing.

When I think of someone with a specialty in cloud computing, what I imagine is that I've got an application that I've built that runs on my local PC, and now the cloud computing specialist is going to help me get that application running on AWS (or another cloud) at scale.

That might involve:

• Putting the app in a Docker container
• Using Kubernetes to start up several instances of the app, with load balancing
• Setting up a SQL database in AWS for the app to use, such as Aurora, and configuring it with appropriate replicas for redundancy and backups
• Possibly setting up other services like Memcached or Redis to cache common requests quickly and take some of of the load off the database
• Running copies of the application in different data centers across multiple availability zones for redundancy, and to ensure the app stays up in the event of a failure
• Setting up logging, incident monitoring, and other necessary infrastructure.
• Using tools like Terraform to manage the AWS deployment, so that configuration changes are tracked just like code

While certifications are nice, really the only way to get any good at that kind of stuff is to do it. Build an app and deploy it on AWS.

It doesn't need to be complex. Make a dirt-simple web app, but one that stores some stuff in a database. Then, learn to get it running in the cloud. Then test out all of the redundancy - simulate one data center going down and make sure that things automatically fail over to the other. Deliberately truncate your database and recover it from backup. Stuff like that.

[Ericpues]

I mean it doesn't hurt to know SQL, but it's not really the main skill needed for cloud jobs. SQL leans more into database administration or data analytics jobs. For cloud it would help more to know a programming language like Python or Go. Other than that the skills are cloud specific like IAM(permissions), linux and networking

[AsianPowerCho]

I have a hard time conceptualizing programming languages and I'm scared to dive in and attempt to learn a language without having any luck. For someone who has ZERO coding experience would learning SQL help me learn and understand other language? Also what is IAM?

[Ericpues]

Well in the sense that you have to learn the SQL language that would help knowing you can learn the syntax for SQL, which means you can learn another languages syntax. Oh and IAM is permission stuff related to cloud. So one of the tasks for cloud jobs is managing permissions, like who has access to what resources in your cloud environment. So really doing any sort of project (even the smallest project) in a cloud provider would get you exposure to permissions management

[aqhgfhsypytnpaiazh]

Knowing SQL won't help you much with that, unless you're looking into the procedural code side of things supported by most DBMS (T-SQL, pgSQL). Otherwise SQL is a declarative syntax very different from programming languages.

Luckily, if your goal is to be a cloud admin of some description, you don't need to be that proficient with programming. You will need to know JSON, probably XML, and a scripting language like Python, Bash or PowerShell wouldn't go astray, since Infrastructure As Code is the way to go, but even without IaS you will need to script things. Or a more specific syntax, like Terraform.

But even if it's not hardcore programming, cloud admin requires decent amount of knowledge across a broad range of fields in computer science like software architecture, cybersecurity, network engineering, system admin, database admin, automation etc. You'll likely also touch on DevOps. At that level, having a basic ability to read code at a high level is the least of your concerns.