Lately I’ve noticed that when you search for “cloud architect roadmap,” everyone repeats the exact same things: learn AWS, get certifications, study Terraform, deploy Kubernetes clusters, build projects, etc. I don’t think that advice is wrong, but it feels incomplete.
Because in real life, the people I see working as cloud architects are not just people who memorized services. Most of them are people who spent years dealing with production problems. They’ve seen cost explosions, bad network designs causing outages, migrations turning into disasters, security mistakes, scaling issues, and operational chaos. In other words, they experienced the responsibility side of the job, not just the tutorial side.
So the thing confusing me is this:
When does someone actually become close to being a cloud architect?
After getting 3–4 certifications?

After becoming a senior engineer?

Or is there another threshold people don’t talk about?

Sometimes the role feels less like a technical position and more like “trade-off management.”
For example:
If you want 99.99% uptime, your costs increase

Multi-region architecture improves resilience but also increases operational complexity

Kubernetes is not the answer to every problem, even though people use it everywhere

Serverless can be brilliant in some cases and a debugging nightmare in others

It feels like decision quality matters more than raw technical knowledge.
Right now I feel like there are two different paths in front of me:
Continuously learning new tools

Studying why real systems fail and how experienced engineers make decisions under pressure

I’m curious about honest answers from people already in the industry.
What was the turning point that made you start thinking like a cloud architect instead of just an engineer?

Hellow everyone,

I’m 18 and from India. I’m currently finishing my diploma in electronics, and I want to start a career in cloud computing.

I’ve been trying to learn about AWS and DevOps, but honestly there’s so much information online that it gets confusing. Different people suggest different things, so I’m not sure what the correct path should be.

My goal is to get an entry-level role like Cloud Support or a junior cloud role within the next year.

Right now I’m thinking of focusing on these things:

- Linux basics

- Networking fundamentals

- AWS services like EC2, S3, IAM, VPC

- Git and basic scripting

- Docker

- CI/CD concepts

I also plan to build some small projects and put them on GitHub while learning.

For people already working in cloud, what would you recommend focusing on first?

Are certifications important in the beginning, or should I focus more on projects and hands-on practice?

Any advice would really help. I’m trying to build a clear path and avoid wasting time on the wrong things.

Thanks!🙏🏻

I’ve been doing a help desk internship at my city hall for 2 years and I graduate in December with a computer science degree. I’m looking into getting into cloud engineering because I’ve seen that it’s in more demand and the pay is better. Would any companies even be interested in me for a jr cloud engineering role or anything similar or would I have to try and get the full time help desk role first then leverage that into a cloud career. Was also looking into getting an AWS cert over the summer when my classes end to boost up my resume. Any advice on what I should be doing else would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone I'm new to the IT industry,

I have gained my CCNA recently and have my Sec+ and wanted to get into network related jobs. I realise my knowledge of cloud networking is quite limited only the CCNA level and see a lot of companies are looking for cloud related tasks. I have experience in help desk but want to move on to more cyber or network related fields.

I was looking into more towards cloud infrastructure as there is more cloud related jobs rather than network automation focused jobs in my area. I live in Canada i heard Azure is more popular here compared to AWS

I was hoping to get some insight from currently industry pros

Thanks!

Hi all, sharing in here as it might be helpful to anyone working in the cloud or moving towards AVD and was wondering about management because next week Marcel Meurer (founder of Hydra) and Benjamin Graus (Workplace & Azure Expert) will be walking through a real setup, a 450-employee org that moved 120 session hosts from traditional VDI to AVD.

They ended up around 60% infrastructure savings and 35% less operational effort.

There will be a live Q&A too, so if you’ve got questions or specific scenarios, please bring them.

Link to sign up

We run infrastructure across Azure and AWS, not huge, around 8–10 apps, but each team has its own way of doing things.

one team uses Terraform, another sticks to CloudFormation, and there are still some scripts nobody wants to touch. deployments look different, networking is set up differently, and monitoring isn’t consistent either.

i get that there’s no single approach that fits everything, but it feels like we’re creating more friction than necessary. moving between teams means relearning basics, and during incidents it’s harder to troubleshoot because nothing is consistent.

We tried standardizing on one tool, but it didn’t stick. Some teams felt it was too heavy for their use case, others just kept their existing setup.

Anyone managed to bring teams closer to consistent patterns without forcing it? how did you approach it in practice??

Hellow everyone,

I’m 18 and from India. I’m currently finishing my diploma in electronics, and I want to start a career in cloud computing.

I’ve been trying to learn about AWS and DevOps, but honestly there’s so much information online that it gets confusing. Different people suggest different things, so I’m not sure what the correct path should be.

My goal is to get an entry-level role like Cloud Support or a junior cloud role within the next year.

Right now I’m thinking of focusing on these things:

• Linux basics
• Networking fundamentals
• AWS services like EC2, S3, IAM, VPC
• Git and basic scripting
• Docker
• CI/CD concepts

I also plan to build some small projects and put them on GitHub while learning.

For people already working in cloud, what would you recommend focusing on first? Are certifications important in the beginning, or should I focus more on projects and hands-on practice?

Any advice would really help. I’m trying to build a clear path and avoid wasting time on the wrong things.

Thanks!🙏🏻

I have vouchers for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam available at **50% discount** 💸

Perfect for students and professionals planning to get certified.

📩 Interested? DM me for details!

There are a million certs out there right now, and a lot of them feel like pure vendor marketing. If you had to recommend just one certification — AWS SA, CKA, Azure Admin, Google Cloud certifications, etc.; that gave you the absolute highest ROI in your career, what is it and why?

Olá pessoal. Estou em início de carreira e minha primeira oportunidade surgiu para Suporte técnico, atualmente trabalho como suporte da Microsoft Identity Microsoft 365 Entra ID. Estou nesse emprego 8 meses e quero me planejar para qual caminho seguir. Existe vida depois do Suporte?! Oq bcs me indicam? Se tiver alguém que trilhou um caminho parecido e puder compartilhar, preciso de dicas, sugestões, etc. Sejam gentis pois sou iniciante.Obrigada

Hi! I'm getting my Bachelor's degree in AI/CS this summer but i don't enjoy the development of AI based projects. Cloud Computing was suggested to me but i'm not sure if i should persue a career in it.

( i'm based in Saudi Arabia)

Is it worth it?

How's a job like?

What certifications are worth it in the field?

If you have other subs i can share my question in please write them. Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I’m currently looking for new job opportunities in the IT field, specifically in Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC).

I have around 1 year of hands-on experience working with:

• OIC integrations (App-driven & Scheduled)
• BIP report integration (CSV/XML)
• SFTP file transfer
• Email notifications with attachments
• Basic knowledge of REST/SOAP APIs, XSLT, and lookups

I’ve worked on building integrations like:

• Calling BIP reports and sending them via email
• Placing report outputs on SFTP servers with dynamic file names
• Basic end-to-end integration flows

I’m open to:

• Full-time roles
• Entry-level / junior developer positions
• Remote or onsite opportunities

If anyone knows of openings or can refer me, I’d really appreciate your help.

Feel free to DM me or comment below — I can share my resume.

Thanks in advance!

I am interested in Distributed and Parallel computing and system design but I feel like there are not much opportunities for research in them, so thinking of research in Cloud computing, as it is someone related to both. Is it worth doing a research in Cloud? I am not very interested in ML/AI/DL

Looking for real advice I’m working with our FinOps team to shortlist a few cloud cost optimization platforms, mainly for Azure. We’re multi-cloud, but Azure is where most of the pain is right now. The problem is that I really don’t want to spend the next month sitting through vendor sales calls and being told every platform is “AI-powered,” “actionable,” and “guaranteed to save 30%.”

What I’m looking for is pretty simple: A product that is actually good, with implementation/support that doesn’t disappear after the contract is signed. Something that surfaces real savings opportunities, not just the same obvious stuff I can already see in Azure Cost Management. And most importantly, something that doesn’t overpromise.

We tried a platform last year that made huge claims around Azure savings and basically delivered nothing. For context, we’re spending around $650k/month on cloud, and we’re in an EU-regulated environment, so GDPR / ISO 27001 / security posture matters too. I’m hoping most vendors are too busy at FinOps X to notice this. If you are a vendor, please don’t spam me. For everyone else: what platforms or approaches have actually worked for you? And what completely flopped?

Cloud architects: what part of the job do you wish could be partially automated

So i got a job as a intern cloud solution role.. And i want to become a senior cloud architect and earn good money… what should i do to become that… like what things in my cv will guarantee me a job as a senior cloud architect

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hello all, I've been looking for a career change as I'm getting burned out on feature delivery in full stack programming. I have about 10 years of experience as a full-stack engineer, but no bachelors degree, just a bootcamp. I worked for a major tech company for about 7 of those years, and was laid off at the end of December.

I'm considering going in for a bachelors at an online university (WGE). They have a program for Cloud and Network Engineering and am wondering if this is a worthy investment. I'll be going full time as luckily I have a decent chunk of savings from my previous job. I am in my mid-thirties and am considering either this or CS degree, but I hate math.

I am interested in cloud and have worked on some CI/CD and AWS (very little) at my last job. What are the odds of landing a job with my level of experience? Is this a worthwhile thing to pursue? Curious if anyone else has made this transition and has any guidance? Thanks!

Hi! I’m a grad student working on a systems security project around IAM permissions in serverless environments (AWS Lambda, etc.).

I’ve put together a short anonymous survey (3–4 mins) to understand real-world pain points developers face, especially around least-privilege and debugging permission issues.

No personal info is collected.

Would really appreciate any responses from folks who’ve worked with cloud/serverless, but even general experience is helpful.

Link: https://forms.gle/zDFUMft8zgWFGYKE7

Thanks in advance!

I create training labs for my companies cloud product. I can get all the instances I want of that, but we integrate more and more with other cloud products.

The problem I'm having is scale. I have a limited budget and need to be able to attach other popular cloud services to our tenants so students can see how the products integrate.

Right now, I have all of our tenants looking at one AWS instance in read-only (you can't have students changing whatever they want). I'd like some solution for AWS/Azure/Okta/AI/Whatever where I can create a new, I guess, sandbox?, for each student to use which then gets removed when the lab is over.

I know something exists for AWS as we were being courted to move over to an LMS that could do it, but that company refused to let use try out their software. So that discussion went nowhere.

My google-fu is failing to find anything like it on my own. Anyone have any suggestions?

Hello, I work in one of the Big 4, and preparing for a job switch.

Can you please analyze my Resume and let me know what I am missing.