Cloud computing advice

[orhanzi]

I gt a diploma in info-com 15yr back and had lost touch doing It. I am thinking to take up some it courses to refresh myself and also to look for a job in the it sector. Heard cloud computing is highly in demand now. What's the route i should take if I am going for cloud computing? Another thing is that I am not really into programming, is cloud computing very dependent on programming? What about ccna? Still worth going for it?

 

[davidktw]

I gt a diploma in info-com 15yr back and had lost touch doing It. I am thinking to take up some it courses to refresh myself and also to look for a job in the it sector. Heard cloud computing is highly in demand now. What's the route i should take if I am going for cloud computing? Another thing is that I am not really into programming, is cloud computing very dependent on programming? What about ccna? Still worth going for it?

I won’t be able to recommend which cloud computing route you should go. However as a cloud architect, I will say the skill to be able to program is highly recommend in a cloud environment.

Without understanding the nitty gritty of software development, the only way you can treat cloud computing is only as a static infrastructure. But that wouldnt differentiate between hosting company and cloud providers like Azure, AWS and GCP right? Clearly cloud computing must have offer more than just a typical hosting company, otherwise why would it even be a hot topic?

Some examples will be, how are you going to automate the consolidation of logs and analysis of the logs without some programming skill set writing codes that could be run in the managed services? How would you be able to appreciate how horizontal scaling automation works in cloud environments without understanding how load balancers works, the security concerns, balancing the requests, sticky or not, choosing between TCP or HTTP(S) load balancing and how it affects the software. How to access all the various services from a programmatic perspective which is why cloud providers shine, unless you knows how to use the SDK provided, and cli tools or utilities. All these are normally Restful APIs invoking authentications and authorisations etc.

While one can be partially functional in cloud environments like setting up servers and services, that is not why cloud computing becomes a hot topic. Much of why it is flexible and elastic is because of the programmatic automation, the devops and large scaling development and deployment concepts and tools. The gel to put all these together and interoperate effectively is knowing a software development disciplines and concepts. If you don’t even like programming, then it will be hard for you to pursue advance topics in cloud computing and to provide services that can truly benefit from it.

CCNA stuff I will let other posters to dwell on it. There are security aspect of cloud computing, but IMHO, the fundamentals of programming is still very much required. It will determine how far and deep you can go into the area. Hope it helps

 

[orhanzi]

I won’t be able to recommend which cloud computing route you should go. However as a cloud architect, I will say the skill to be able to program is highly recommend in a cloud environment.

Without understanding the nitty gritty of software development, the only way you can treat cloud computing is only as a static infrastructure. But that wouldnt differentiate between hosting company and cloud providers like Azure, AWS and GCP right? Clearly cloud computing must have offer more than just a typical hosting company, otherwise why would it even be a hot topic?

Some examples will be, how are you going to automate the consolidation of logs and analysis of the logs without some programming skill set writing codes that could be run in the managed services? How would you be able to appreciate how horizontal scaling automation works in cloud environments without understanding how load balancers works, the security concerns, balancing the requests, sticky or not, choosing between TCP or HTTP(S) load balancing and how it affects the software. How to access all the various services from a programmatic perspective which is why cloud providers shine, unless you knows how to use the SDK provided, and cli tools or utilities. All these are normally Restful APIs invoking authentications and authorisations etc.

While one can be partially functional in cloud environments like setting up servers and services, that is not why cloud computing becomes a hot topic. Much of why it is flexible and elastic is because of the programmatic automation, the devops and large scaling development and deployment concepts and tools. The gel to put all these together and interoperate effectively is knowing a software development disciplines and concepts. If you don’t even like programming, then it will be hard for you to pursue advance topics in cloud computing and to provide services that can truly benefit from it.

CCNA stuff I will let other posters to dwell on it. There are security aspect of cloud computing, but IMHO, the fundamentals of programming is still very much required. It will determine how far and deep you can go into the area. Hope it helps

I don't need to become a true expert knowing the beyond. Just enough to earn my rice bowl can liao.

 

[davidktw]

I don't need to become a true expert knowing the beyond. Just enough to earn my rice bowl can liao.

What I described above is “enough”. But if you feel there is a “lesser”, feel free to try out.

 

[orhanzi]

What I described above is “enough”. But if you feel there is a “lesser”, feel free to try out.

Oic. Thanks for the advice. Very honour to see your reply here. In my past, I did try out learning programming, while learning, some of the cases examples involved a lot of advanced maths which I wasn't able to understand. So I didn't continue.

 

[Phen8210]

it is a never ending learning process, people will replace u if u dont keep up.

 

[jackoats.sg]

Cloud computing is quite a wide. Basically there are a few tracks:
1) Infrastructure
2) Cloud Development
3) AI
4) Data

A good way to find out what's in-demand is to go thru the job ads descriptions.

I feel that Cloud Infrastructure is useful to get you started, as it covers compute engines, data, networking, security, and some cloud development.

Go for AWS / Azure / Google Cloud Associate certification to start.

Good luck for your learning & certification!

 

[jgyy1990]

I already gotten AWS and linux certifications. The sheer amount of stacks you need to learn as cloud engineer is way more than software development to me. Normally when people speak of cloud computing, they are usually referring to public cloud like aws, azure and gcp. Their biggest advantage is scalability and elasticity to me.

 

[davidktw]

I already gotten AWS and linux certifications. The sheer amount of stacks you need to learn as cloud engineer is way more than software development to me. Normally when people speak of cloud computing, they are usually referring to public cloud like aws, azure and gcp. Their biggest advantage is scalability and elasticity to me.

Definitely, personally I will put an engineer whom is well versed in cloud computing analogous to a solution architect whom is also a software engineer. Cloud computing basically compress the job scopes of at least of software engineer, system engineer and a solution architect. The individual will make decisions and considerations that are not only concern software development, but also operations.

Besides the holistic software design, one will also need to take care of how to create high availability, extensibility, scalability, elasticity, and robustness in the solution. Depending on the size to architect, one will need to consider how the solution may grow globally even across regions(countries) if necessary.

These skill sets involve more than just software, but good understanding of other issues like how emails routes, how inter-systems communicate besides just HTTP/XML/JSON. The person will need to know much about networking, storage solutions, DNS, a certain level of security considerations, CDN concepts, load-distribution and tasks-distribution, and much more.

Full stack is like just a loosely defined jargon to which I personally don't regard it to serve any real technical competency than just a marketing term.

 

[Definitely]

I gt a diploma in info-com 15yr back and had lost touch doing It. I am thinking to take up some it courses to refresh myself and also to look for a job in the it sector. Heard cloud computing is highly in demand now. What's the route i should take if I am going for cloud computing? Another thing is that I am not really into programming, is cloud computing very dependent on programming? What about ccna? Still worth going for it?

For the CCNA, the cert itself may not be worth as much nowadays, but the knowledge will still be useful even if you're not a network engineer. You can always learn by yourself, but of course if you need a structure to follow and you have some spare cash, it's not a bad idea to go for the exam.

 

[minamikaze]

there's a reason why cloud computing technical professionals are so highly compensated (sometimes similar to director level salaries). good ones are super hard to find and a lot of skillsets required.
need programming knowledge, knowledge of all the cloud pieces, good systems knowledge, good security knowledge etc.