Learning about “the cloud” or building apps using the Cloud can sound scary at first. I never learned about it in college, so I didn’t expect it to be so important day-to-day in my job. I’ve since learned that building applications and leveraging the cloud is vital and not scary at all. I’ve learned from working on some large projects that used Terraform or some popular AWS services (Lambda, RDS, etc). But, most of my learning has come from online cloud development tutorials. There is likely an infinite amount of tutorials on cloud-related topics, which makes it hard to know which ones are the best. I won’t claim to know the best set of tutorials to get you where you want to be. However, I can suggest the ones I’ve tried which have helped me start from nothing.
Tutorial 1: AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials
Diving right into AWS services and building applications works for many people, but I wanted to build a strong base of knowledge related to the cloud before writing any code.
This six-hour course from AWS focuses on the AWS Cloud, its use cases, and its benefits. Luckily, you can apply many of the concepts taught in this course to whatever cloud provider you decide to learn, whether it’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP. They designed the course so anyone can take it, regardless of their role or technical proficiency. After taking this course last year and reading up on some AWS services, I was able to pass the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam pretty easily.
Tutorial 2: Udemy AWS Solutions Architect Associate Course
The next course I would suggest is a Udemy course that I took to grow my ability to research and use AWS services to build functional systems. This course costs around $15 but has close to 30 hours of video lectures. They cover most of the important services and some specific discussions about Solution Architecture. The course dives deeply into explaining how you can use and configure each service to work effectively. The instructor also spends a large amount of time showing how to use the AWS console for each service. I found this hands-on approach to be very valuable.
While Udemy designed the course for those preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect exam (which is why I’m taking it), it can be used to grow your knowledge of AWS services and build a foundational intuition for architecting systems.
Tutorial 3: Terraform Associate Certification Study Guide
Terraform is an IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tool that is used to build and manage infrastructure. I worked on a complex project that used Terraform to manage all of our AWS infrastructure but never learned about how to effectively use it and its best practices. This study guide page links to various video and text-based resources. Those resources cover topics like IaC, why it’s so popular, and how to set up and use Terraform. It has tutorials that guide you line by line to write, deploy, and destroy actual infrastructure using a cloud provider. The resources and concepts get more complicated further into the study guide, but even just working through the first couple of modules was helpful for me. I felt more confident in writing clean Terraform code and setting it up on my personal projects.
Valuable Cloud Development Tutorials
These certainly are just a few of many great cloud development tutorials out there for starting your path to becoming a cloud expert. I’ve found a lot of value in these tutorials and courses, and I hope you do as well!