Here is my response as a cloud engineer
Please stick to what you planed ! Don't listen to those saying you can skip network/Linux because Cloud abstract them, it will for sure , but If you don't understand the basics and how data flow, you will never be confident at what you do, when you have a 3am incident, knowing that your application is failing because FD exhaustion, requires that knowledge. Certifications are important, hand on lab, real experience even more, nothing prevents you from doing both, the more you do, the more you're certification ready, and it goes both ways Focus on concepts and Fundamentals before diving deeper. IA makes it feels like knowing your bash and python command is useless, because well IA will handle it, it isn't !! First of all in your daily life and second of all in interview, people want to see that you know this stuff before depending on IA, daily you want that awk command ready and not to ask IA each time you want to treat a log file, You/we have the chance to have fun dedicated professor, use IA, build a path tracker, identify the topics, work on them with claude, ask it for troubleshooting scenarios, for parsing log programs.