#6 Month Cloud Study Plan
As many hours as you can a day, a minimum of 2 hours a day of deep non distracted work.
- Pomodoro technique is great for this.
- Put DND on your phone.
- Put on some noise cancelling headphones and listen to music with no lyrics.
- I personally listen to Synthwave.
Keep a study journal.
- I use Notion. Use any app or paper that works for you.
- Don’t worry too much about structure here, this is for your own reflection. Have a space for notes.
- At the end of your study time for the day, write in your journal a summary of what you learned, struggled with, resources you used, and what you will do the next day.
End each section with a project
- Difficulty does not matter. Clarity and understanding does. A project is meant to prove your skills and to be references on your online portfolio and resume.
- Put it on GitHub or better yet make it live.
- All Cloud Platforms have free credits when you sign up and plenty of services have free tiers. Use them. Setup budgets. Don’t be afraid to spend $20 or so a month learning.
End each project with documentation.
I’ve factored in 3 days for each phase for documentation purposes, use them.
- Create a blog post, LinkedIn Post, or YouTube video synthesizing what you’ve built with your news skills, challenges, resources you used, etc.
- Don’t try to come off as anything you aren’t. You are not an expert.
- Use your own style and voice. Authenticity and realness help land jobs too.
- This is why you keep a daily study journal. So, you can reference things to later write/talk about. Our minds are RAM, not storage.
- Create a free account in any cloud platform.
- Setup a learning budget in your cloud account ($20 a month is more than enough).
- Set up alerts at 50%, 75% consumption.
- Create a blog or YouTube channel to document your learning.
- Create a GitHub Account. I also recommend checking out GitHub Copilot and learning how to use ChatGPT to make you more productive.
🐧 1. Bash
How you will interact with servers.
In your Cloud account, deploy the cheapest Ubuntu VM possible. Use this for your studies. Turn it off after you’re done but also configure it to turn off at a the end of the day in case you forget.
Here is a free 2-hour course covering the basics of Bash.
2 weeks
- 10 Days studying and working in that Ubuntu VM.
- 4 Days writing scripts.
Project
📞 2. Networking
How all machines talk to each other in the cloud.
2 weeks
- 10 Days networking concepts.
- 4 Days building a project.
Project ideas
- Create a well-documented network architecture diagram and become familiar with diagraming tools.
- 2 tier and 3 tier architectures.
- Become familiar with the architecture center of your cloud platform.
- Browse and find an example that interests you. Read it in and out. Look up any concepts you don’t understand. Create a blog post/video explaining.
👩🏽💻 3. Programming, Git, and Prompt Engineering
The best programming language for Cloud Beginners.
You should’ve learned about variables, loops, and more programming concepts in the Bash section, build on that here.
5 weeks
- 1 Week Studying Python
- 1 Week Git and GitHub
- 1 Week Prompt Engineer and GitHub Copilot
- 2 Weeks building a project.
Project:
☁️ 4. AWS/Azure/GCP
The Cloud Platform.
You should’ve picked up some cloud knowledge already but time to dive in deeper.
6 weeks
- 4 Weeks Studying for associate level certification.
- 2 Weeks building Cloud Resume Challenge (or any cloud project).
👷🏽♀️ 5. Terraform
The tool you will use to automate your infrastructure provisioning.
2 weeks
- 1 Week Studying
- 1 Week building Infrastructure as Code files for any of your previous projects.
🐳 6. Docker
The tool you will use to make your applications portable.
2 weeks
- 1 Week Studying
- 1 Week containerizing any of your previous projects.
⚒️ 7. GitHub Actions
The tool you will use to automate deployments of your applications.
2 weeks
- 1 Week Studying
- 1 Week building CI/CD for any of your previous projects.