Engineering Grads' Path to Data Engineering: Learning one Cloud
Akash A Wadhankar
Data and AI Influencer | Senior Solution Architect @ InfoCepts | Believer of Big Leap
Ability of any organization to innovate is defined by the technology infrastructure as one factor. I still remember the days when we used to work on on-premise infrastructure. Our customer had a data center in Baltimore. We would be given a defined capacity and technology stack. We, as a technology team, were not allowed to consume full capacity. Across the same company, we used to define time to test our resources. Pushing these apps to production was another pain. So many approvals and planning would be needed in advance. That is where the cloud came into the picture.
What was the impact of Cloud?
Cloud had a huge impact on the speed of execution of any project. It has had a huge impact in an extremely positive manner.
Cloud revolutionized the way we look at things. The speed of innovation has gone up.
Who are the major players in Cloud Engineering?
As a first-time learner should I learn them all?
Not at all. Based on my experience I will tell you: pick one. I picked AWS as my project and customer chose AWS. I have worked on AWS cloud for approximately 5+ years now. I know AWS well. Now I do a relative comparison when looking at other clouds.
Azure and GCP both have products similar to AWS. You can pick one and then later in your career, as per your need, expand.
Pick one. I picked AWS.
What should be Engineering grad's path of learning cloud?
Getting Familiar: Go to the certification section and pick the content from basic practitioner certification. It is not essential to do certification. If you do, that is good too. Practitioner certifications are easier ones. I would suggest not giving unless needed. With topics in hand, go to YouTube or Udemy and finish the learnings on the topic.
Building firm knowledge: Do not stop at practitioner. Learn few more components to become a developer. Let me put down the AWS cloud components.
These services are enough for starters. There are many services but knowing these is enough as a starter to a Data Engineer path.
Categorize to replicate: Always imagine that you are learning AWS compute when you learn AWS Lambda, AWS storage when studying AWS s3 and AWS notification when studying AWS SNS. This type of categorization helps to find similar products in other clouds and speed up adoption in future.
As I already said no need to hop on multiple cloud. Stick to one for a starter. You can pick any later part of career as per the need of your project.
What advantages you get when you know the basics of Cloud Engineering?
I am a firm believer that if the battleground is known, half the battle is won. In any good company you join, there will be some cloud present. If you see familiar things, you will be able to pick them up easily. I used to work on AWS cloud. When I joined my current organization, I was productive from day one. The power of infrastructure standardization that the cloud has brought is amazing. It also helps us as Solution Architects when we sit to design a system.
In conclusion, an aspiring Data Engineer must learn the concepts of the cloud and get familiar with them as soon as possible. Cloud Engineering is still a booming field and has a long way to go. So, gear up and study one cloud.
Thank you for reading! Happy Learning!!