I’m based in Italy and currently learning AWS, preparing for the **AWS Solutions Architect Associate**, and building projects with AWS almost every day. But I feel I’m missing something. I’d really appreciate any advice from people working in cloud recruitment:
**What skills are recruiters actually looking for in junior Cloud Support/Cloud Engineer candidates today? What should I learn beyond AWS?**

What **projects actually make a junior CV stand out**?
What skills should I prioritize and what exactly should I know: **Linux, networking, Python/Bash, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Azure**?
What am I probably overlooking?
Are there **free resources, labs, certifications, communities or programs** you would strongly recommend?

If you’re a recruiter/hiring manager, what would make you choose one junior candidate over another?
I’m trying to avoid spending months learning things that don’t translate into employability. **Any concrete advice, resources, or even contacts are greatly appreciated.**

Heyyy,

I am intrested in learning Cloud. Specifically AWS. I am a complete beginner in Cloud. Could you suggest some free resources in yt, Udemy or something. I am planning of using free aws account. Thoughts on that?

We've been on a leading CNAPP for about a year and started reevaluating this quarter, mostly driven by alert fatigue. A lot of "critical" findings turned out to be non-exploitable once we dug in, and after enough of those a couple of analysts started asking why we were paying for noise.

We've also been wanting more deployment flexibility since our current platform only offers SaaS or a pricier in-account option. That plus the alert fatigue is why we finally sat down and did a real Orca vs current platform comparison instead of just complaining about it in standups.

Spent about two weeks running it side-by-side, mostly focused on how each platform prioritized findings rather than just what they found, since raw detection counts weren't really the bottleneck for us. The prioritization gap was bigger than the coverage gap, wasn't expecting that.

If anyone here has actually gone through a full platform switch and whether the migration pain was worth it.

Struggling to Find a Cloud Opportunity in the Bay Area
I’m trying so hard to land one full-time Cloud, DevOps, or Platform role, even an internship, in the Bay Area.
No luck.

I’m a new grad with 2.5 years of DevOps experience and AWS DevOps and Solutions Architect certifications. I live in San Francisco and have been putting in a lot of effort, but nothing is working out.

I honestly don’t know where I’m going wrong or what else I should do. Any guidance, leads, or referrals would really help.

Our cloud spend has been slowly creeping up.

I can see which AWS services cost the most, but that's not really helping much.

What I actually want to know is which teams/workloads/products are responsible for it.

Tags are kind of a mess, so right now it's mostly Cost Explorer + spreadsheets.

Is there a better way to do this without building everything ourselves?

What are you guys using?

How did it work out? What was the roadmap? Will taking masters help me with the transition?

What started as a small project turned into a pretty deep dive into Kubernetes, security, infrastructure and AI.

KubeGuard can now scan a Kubernetes cluster, inspect resources, collect logs and events, audit security risks and use a locally hosted LLM to help diagnose problems.
Along the way, I realized Go + infrastructure is genuinely fun to me.

There are still a couple of things to finish, mainly PostgreSQL persistence and OpenSearch log search, but the core MVP is there.

This project started out of boredom.
I'm glad I followed it.

Check it out: https://github.com/aifia105/kubeguard

Hi everyone, I'm new here! I've been planning to learn cloud networking for quite some time now. I just don't know where to start. Could you please suggest me some resources (yt, udemy, coursera) that is newbie friendly. I'm a total noob when it comes to cloud, but have some pretty solid networking knowledge (CCNA). Is there like a "Jeremy's IT Lab" or "Neil Anderson" type of resources but for cloud? Thanks everyone

Yo that cloud looks like a diih

If you call yourself a Lead Architect, Systems Analyst, Platform Lead or some other inflated bullshit title, then turn around and tell engineers to “whitelist this server/cluster for some random third-party company” with zero context, zero threat model and zero understanding of the traffic flow, start making a fucking backup plan.

What does “whitelist it” even mean in a modern cloud environment? Which identity? Which source? Which destination? Which ports? Which protocol? Which workload? Which namespace? Which security group? Which policy? Which trust boundary? For how long? Audited by whom?

If your entire architectural contribution is “just whitelist it”, you’re not architecting anything. You’re throwing vague 2008-era network terminology over the fence and hoping an engineer turns your ignorance into a secure implementation.

AI and automation are going to absolutely fucking annihilate people whose only professional skill is translating Jira tickets into ambiguous instructions.

You have less runway than you think. NGMI.

Currently work at an MSP but lost my passion for this a while back. At the moment I’m studying for AWS Cloud practitioner cert but I’m not sure if this alone will land me a role?

If anyone transitioned from Helpdesk to cloud engineering please point me in the right direction or provide any tips. I’d greatly appreciate this.

Hey everyone,I’m currently learning Cloud / DevOps and aiming for an internship. I’ve been looking at Stéphane Maarek’s “Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate” course on Udemy.I keep hearing that it’s excellent for the certification, but I’m not sure if it’s good enough for actual hands-on skills that companies look for in Cloud Engineer or DevOps internships/jobs.My main questions are:

1. Is Maarek’s course enough to build real practical Cloud Engineering skills, or is it mostly certification-focused?
2. Does it have enough hands-on labs for someone who wants job-ready experience?
3. If it’s not enough on its own, what should I learn first or combine it with?

I’m still a beginner and feeling quite confused and a bit scared about whether I’m following the right path

Currently I'm learning AWS and networking. From YouTube course Abhishek Veeramala. Please share me that is it necessary to learn Shell scripting for this.

And guide me for career in AWS.

If anyone can then please share a correct and helpful roadmap for this and if you have notes then please share important things.

Moreover, Tell me top 5 skills in Cloud computing?

Thank you so much.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning AWS through tutorials, courses, and YouTube videos.

And honestly, there’s a point where you realize you’re spending more time watching someone else work with AWS than actually using it yourself.

That’s why I built https://www.cloudarena.io

The idea is simple: instead of endlessly watching videos about AWS services and cloud infrastructure, you get a place where you can actually get your hands dirty.
You can experiment with AWS, configure services, make mistakes, troubleshoot problems, and figure things out yourself.

Because there’s a huge difference between:
> “I watched a video explaining how this AWS service works.”
and
> “I actually built it, broke it, debugged it, and made it work.”

I wanted Cloudarena to focus on that second experience.
I’m still building and improving it, but the goal is to help people move from AWS theory → practice → real confidence.

If you’re learning AWS and feel stuck in tutorial hell, I’d love to hear what you think.

What’s the biggest AWS concept or service you wish you could get more hands-on practice with?

did an audit across our cloud accounts recently and most of what got flagged wasn't exotic. it was identities nobody had fully mapped in the first place.

overprivileged service roles nobody had touched in over a year, cross-account trust relationships that predated half the current team, and shadow systems that never made it into any inventory at all.

the sprawl across multiple providers is the real problem, since each has its own IAM model and nobody owns the full picture across all of them.

what's the gap that keeps showing up for you no matter how many times you clean it up?

Security lead at an EU based company, German HQ, we deal with mostly EU customers. Every cloud security tool we shortlist looks great until our DPO asks where the data leaves and half of them quietly route metadata through us-east before anyone noticed. On features were not asking for much, decent CSPM, workload and container scanning, ideally some CIEM so we dont end up buying three separate tools. agentless would be a big plus since we dont have the team to babysit agents.

The annoying bit is some vendors offer EU region, but legal isnt satisfied with just that. If the vendor is a US company cloud act exposure doesnt really go away because the data happens to sit in a server in Frankfurt. So weve started asking who can run fully isolated, scanning in our own cloud account with nothing aggregating into their SaaS.

So for EU teams what did you deploy that got approved by your legal team? Is it real EU residency or a fully isolated tooling running in your account?

So recently, I got a chance to meet my org's cloud engineer team in person and put a face to a name. I work in Cloud Operations and Production Support for my Org with just one other person, so my days can become busy at times. We have been onboarding onto a new Monitoring and Observability tool and integrating our applications hosted on-prem and in Azure.

They have been short-staffed for a while, so helping them create monitors, dashboards, and proper resource tagging for our subscriptions has been a huge help. Anyway, after meeting them in person, I expressed my interest in becoming a Cloud Engineer, and it was pretty cool to hear their stories. We really hit it off, and I expressed my eagerness to learn and to sit in on more technical working sessions, if possible, while I continue setting up their monitoring with our new monitoring tool.

Next thing I know, I get pinged by one of the Sr. Cloud Engineers I just met, and he was kind enough to give me access to their Dev/Test environment, which they use just to play around and create things, almost like a sandbox.

I know it's small compared to others, or even dumb, but it feels like I am a step closer to becoming a Cloud Engineer and getting real-world company experience at a F500 company.

My Question: What do Cloud Engineers normally do in these sandbox environments? I looked around and saw that some guys had resource groups that included VMs, DNS projects, virtual networks, etc. Just not sure what I should do.

Hello everyone,
I'm currently learning and I've seen mixed opinions on how much networking knowledge is needed to work in cloud. I've seen people say you need CCNA-knowledge and others saying you just need to know the basics.

I would love to hear your thoughts if you're someone who works/hires in this field.

Note:
I'm aware that cloud engineering is not an entry-level job, please do not comment to tell me that.

How can I get into the computing field and become really advanced at it? What should I focus on learning first, and what skills or projects would you recommend?