Want to study Cloud Computing, don't know where to start from?

Cloud covers so many bases that you might want to narrow your focus a bit. I would recommend that you take advantage of the free tier from AWS. You can test out and work with most of the features. This ought to help you decide where to focus your time and effort.

For me, I often find it difficult to get a handle on a new bit of tech if I don't actually use it for something, even if that something is a simple as a hello world app.

Hi Archit,

As with everyone else here, I wish you the best of luck in your education and journey. Indeed, cloud computing seems to be growing ever more popular. As a Support Manager, I needed to prepare myself and my team of support engineers for dealing with cloud computing and cloud environment as well.

Our most helpful tool that we used was Linux Academy - there is a wide variety of courses and lessons available for people to take for multiple clouds platforms (not just AWS!).

The next step my team and I took was to work on our various cloud environment certifications, such as AWS Cloud certifications or Azure Cloud Certifications. Even without paying for the certification itself, the courses and tests are helpful in expanding your skill set and education.

Hi Archit,

Imagine you have 1000 PC/Laptop/Servers in an office containing 1000s of pictures, videos etc, that you need to access on a daily basis (like Google Photos for example). Imagine hosting 1000 such hardware infrastructure. Not only will it be expensive, but also difficult to manage. And to access it you have to go to this office everyday --- not so feasible.

Now imaging you have 1 box (hypervisor) that can host 1000 such virtual servers (such as VMs) hosted on the internet, that you can access from your home/mobile phone anywhere anytime. That is cloud computing. Everything is in the cloud.

As for where to get started, I see others have provided great links. Here's another one: Even if you don't want to take the exam, the resources provided here are good https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications/certifications/associate/ccna-cloud.html.

Goodluck to you.

You may want to start with a free edX introductory online course on cloud computing.

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-cloud-infrastructure-technologies

Cloud provides a way to host your application / website / services without having to buy your own hardware and networking. This is a good career path for Application developers as well as IT Infrastructure engineers.

Next Step :

You can take a two-pronged approach to know more about cloud.

1. Structured learning : These courses on Udemy provide a good overview (Coursera also has similar courses). https://www.udemy.com/cloud-computing-basics-essential-concepts-you-must-know/ and https://www.udemy.com/getting-started-with-cloud-computing-level-1/
2. Hands-on learning : AWS , Azure and Google Cloud provide free account that you can use for running your own programs.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon all publish a lot of articles, white papers, and exams on cloud computing. You may want to consider starting there and navigating towards what is most interesting to you in Cloud Computing. For example, Amazon's Cloud Practitioner certification process can expose you to basic Cloud Computing concepts that may allow you to decide what is most interesting to you.

Cloud computing revolutionized the world of technology, and will continue to play a central role in the creation of new products and businesses for the foreseeable future. It's a big topic, so I would first recommend that you start determining what exactly you want to do within the world of cloud computing.

For example, do you want to build applications that run "in the cloud?" Do you want to manage the cloud-based parts of a company's information technology (IT) infrastructure? Do you want to work on the business side of a cloud-based software company (e.g. marketing, sales, customer support, etc.)?

One thing you can do to determine what interests you the most is to try to schedule informational interviews with professionals in the field. There's no replacement for that kind of experience. An informational interview is typically about 30 minutes. You can reach out to a professional whose job you're interested in, and ask them to tell you about their career path and the choices they made along the way.

The basics of a good informational interview are:

1. Research the individual in advance so that you can ask them good questions.
2. Come to the meeting prepared with a list of questions (you may even want to send the questions to your contact in advance).
3. Follow up with a thank-you note after the meeting.