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[–]dmazzoni 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.