AvenueJ

When you learn math, there’s a clear, linear, progression. Arithmetic, then algebra, trigonometry right after, pre-calculus, calculus, and then infinite diverging paths of continued suffering. The body of knowledge that compromises cloud computing does not, unfortunately, work this way. Yet, many cloud computing courses, regardless of the certificate that acts as the end-goal, are structured like this. “First, we must learn IAM, then, RDS, after which comes EC2…” I am here to argue against this methodology. Breadth, not depth, of every relevant service, should, at the very least, be the starting point for the green learner of any cloud computing ecosystem. Why? Because cloud computing is not math.

Ok, so what even is cloud computing then?

According to Amazon:

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Microsoft:

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.

Google:

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources (such as storage and infrastructure), as services over the internet. It eliminates the need for individuals and businesses to self-manage physical resources themselves, and only pay for what they use.

I don’t know about you, but I did not have a clear grasp of what cloud computing was when I started learning about it, and definitions like these were largely unhelpful. It’s all technically correct, but too corporate.

At the heart of it, the “cloud” is just system design Legos hosted on remote servers. Databases, load balancers, message brokers, security tools, and more — all there for you to play with in the cloud provider’s toy box on servers far away, in locations you don’t care about it, managed by people you’ll never meet. When you study for a cloud provider’s certification, what you’re really studying is how their suite of different tools interact. Interesting things rarely happen when these tools are used in isolation. You (probably) already know what a SQL database is, and don’t really need a full course on just RDS (Amazon’s (R)elation (D)atabase (S)ervice). However, you will need to know how it interacts with the other AWS services. So, while you’re on the RDS chapter of your AWS learning journey, you’ll probably see something like this:

Amazon RDS stores data in managed database engines while integrating with IAM for auth, VPC security groups and subnets for network isolation, CloudWatch for metrics, EventBridge for notifications, S3 for backups and imports/exports, KMS for encryption, and Secrets Manager for credential rotation.

I don’t know about you, but when I had to learn individual services incrementally, lines like this read as gibberish. And yet, most instructional materials for cloud computing insist on this format, outlining circular dependencies and caveats redundantly between different services, hoping that your knowledge of the entire service network will gradually crystallize into something comprehensible.

But if you start with a basic, elevator-pitch level of understanding of each service, the caveats and idiosyncrasies that each service has with the others sound a lot less like unintelligible jargon. To clarify, I’m not saying people need to totally restructure the way they teach or learn cloud computing. They’re just missing a chapter 0.

In conclusion, take whatever course, read any book, watch every video series you find. But do yourself a favor: for your particular certification of interest, understand, at a high-level, every service they’re going to go over before the course gets to it. Nothing crazy. Learn as much about every service as you now know about RDS. That will make a world of difference in your ability to process the information being conveyed to you. Good luck!