Cloud Engineer

What is a Cloud Engineer?

A cloud engineer designs and runs the infrastructure that applications live on, using platforms like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. The work covers how services are laid out, how they talk to each other securely, how they scale under load, and what it all costs. Cost is a real part of the job — a design that works but is three times more expensive than it needs to be is not a good design.

• Cloud environments for whole products
• Networking, permissions and security boundaries
• Autoscaling and load-balanced services
• Backup and disaster recovery setups
• Cost optimisation across accounts

A high-level preview of the areas this journey covers. Your detailed roadmap comes next.

1. 1Linux and the command line
2. 2Networking fundamentals
3. 3One cloud platform, in depth
4. 4Infrastructure as code
5. 5Identity and access management
6. 6Containers
7. 7Monitoring and reliability
8. 8Cost management

• You like architecture and how pieces connect
• You enjoy working with infrastructure over interfaces
• You are careful about permissions and security
• You like measurable improvements such as cost or uptime
• You are comfortable reading long documentation

Worth knowing before you commit. Every path has these.

• Each cloud provider is its own large ecosystem
• A misconfiguration can expose data publicly
• Costs can escalate quickly and quietly
• Certifications help but don't replace real experience
• Debugging distributed infrastructure is hard