Welcome cloud engineering friend! 👋
What Is Open Up The Cloud?
If the question is: “What does a software engineer need to know about engineering in the cloud?”… this website is the answer.
The world of software engineering shifted in the past 10 years, and cloud technologies are dominant. Which has massively changed how software engineering works, and you’ll need to learn fast if you want to keep up.
How Does It Work?
Every week, I publish new articles on different cloud engineering topics. And every month I publish my cloud engineering newsletter which rounds up the important news and to rounds-up all my articles from the month.
Everything that’s published comes under a pillar of Cloud Engineering, and each pillar has it’s own “Ultimate Guide” (e.g. Serverless, Infrastructure As Code, Containers). The guides are a useful place to find all the links to all articles on that topic.
Where To Start?
Wondering where to start, here’s what I’d recommend.
For Everyone Into Cloud
Firstly, I’d recommend you sign up to the newsletter (find out more about the newsletter) as the newsletter will give you continued updates on the world of cloud engineering, and any new things I release go in that newsletter.
When you’re signed up for the newsletter, then I’d suggest to go right ahead and dive into some of the articles (full list at the end of the page).
If you want a direct recommendation, I’d suggest Where (And How) to Start Learning AWS as a Beginner which is by far the most popular article on the website—over 25,000 people read that article last year alone.
For Total Cloud Beginners
If you’re a total beginner to the cloud / AWS, I’d recommend the following articles as a starting point.
- Where (And How) to Start Learning AWS as a Beginner
- Best Resources For AWS Certifications: An Extensive & Opinionated Guide (So You Pass The First Time!)
- Does AWS Require Coding? Understanding When You Might Need To Code.
- Is AWS Easy To Learn? (And How You Can Make It Easier)
Every Article I’ve Ever Written
Alternatively, you can dive into any article that grabs your attention.
They’re all here, broken down by category…
AWS
- Is An AWS Certification Enough To Get You A Job? (Spoiler Alert: No)
- Can You Learn AWS (And Get Certified) With No Experience? e.g. No IT Background Or Degree
- How Long Will It Take To Learn AWS? And How To Speed The Process Up!
- Best Resources For AWS Certifications: An Extensive & Opinionated Guide (So You Pass The First Time!)
- How To Test AWS Lambda: Everything You Need To Get Started.
- How To Debug AWS Lambda: A Detailed Overview
- Lambda Extensions: What Are They, And Should You Care?
- Can You Stop An AWS Lambda Execution?
- Can You Learn AWS On Your Own? How To Ensure Success.
- What Are The Pre-Requisites To Learning AWS? 5 Topics You Probably Should Look Into First.
- Does AWS Require Coding? Understanding When You Might Need To Code.
- Can AWS Lambda Access A Database? And The Considerations You Should Be Taking.
- Is AWS Easy To Learn? (And How You Can Make It Easier)
- You’re Alerting Wrong: The Why & How Of Setting An AWS Lambda Alarm Using Error Rate Percentages.
- Should You Use Typescript To Write Terraform? (The Terraform CDK)
- How To Setup Monitoring / Observability On Existing Software (e.g. A Web API): A Practical 5 Step Guide.
- How Do You Look at Console.Log Output of an Amazon Lambda Function?
- The Simplest Possible EC2 Web Server Setup Using Terraform (On AWS)
- Serverless on AWS Lambda: A Comprehensive Comparison Of Approaches (Serverless Framework vs SAM vs Terraform vs CloudFormation)
- 3 Simple Serverless Beginner Projects Ideas
- Misconceptions of Serverless: 5 Things You Thought AWS Lambda Did… But It Doesn’t.
- How to Use AWS KMS in AWS Lambda
- The Ultimate Terraform Workflow: Setup Terraform (And Remote State) With Github Actions
- Master the AWS Lambda Console: A Comprehensive Walkthrough.
- AWS Queues And Lambda Processing: A Simple, Quick Walkthrough.
- Create An AWS S3 Website Using Terraform And Github Actions
- Where (And How) to Start Learning AWS as a Beginner
- How To Get AWS Lambda Logs Into CloudWatch
- Set Up AWS Lambda With An ALB (Load Balancer)
- AWS Lambda on Github Actions: How To Send Zipped Artifacts to AWS S3
- AWS access keys — 5 Tips To Safely Use Them.
- AWS networking fundamentals: A simple guide for software engineers.
- Your personal AWS setup (and how to not get hacked)
Serverless
- In Serverless, Who Sets Up The Environment? What You Do & Don’t Have Access To
- How To Test AWS Lambda: Everything You Need To Get Started.
- How To Debug AWS Lambda: A Detailed Overview
- Are Containers Serverless?
- Lambda Extensions: What Are They, And Should You Care?
- Can You Stop An AWS Lambda Execution?
- Can AWS Lambda Access A Database? And The Considerations You Should Be Taking.
- You’re Alerting Wrong: The Why & How Of Setting An AWS Lambda Alarm Using Error Rate Percentages.
- How Do You Look at Console.Log Output of an Amazon Lambda Function?
- Serverless on AWS Lambda: A Comprehensive Comparison Of Approaches (Serverless Framework vs SAM vs Terraform vs CloudFormation)
- 3 Simple Serverless Beginner Projects Ideas
- Misconceptions of Serverless: 5 Things You Thought AWS Lambda Did… But It Doesn’t.
- How to Use AWS KMS in AWS Lambda
- Master the AWS Lambda Console: A Comprehensive Walkthrough.
- AWS Queues And Lambda Processing: A Simple, Quick Walkthrough.
- How To Setup AWS Lambda Scheduled Events with Terraform
- How To Get AWS Lambda Logs Into CloudWatch
- Set Up AWS Lambda With An ALB (Load Balancer)
- AWS Lambda on Github Actions: How To Send Zipped Artifacts to AWS S3
- 4 Signs You Should Break Your App Into Microservices
- The 6 Concepts You Need To Know Before Trying Serverless
- Setting up a REST API on Serverless Framework
Certifications
- Which AWS Certification Should You Take First? The Definitive Answer.
- How Long Will It Take To Learn AWS? And How To Speed The Process Up!
- Best Resources For AWS Certifications: An Extensive & Opinionated Guide (So You Pass The First Time!)
- How Much Do AWS Certifications Cost? Including All The Extras
- ACloudGuru: Is It Worth The Money? And Your Main Options For Learning Cloud
- ACloudGuru Review: AWS SysOps Exam Prep.
Infrastructure-As-Code
- What Is Terraform Used For? The 3 Main Use Cases.
- How Long Does It Take To Learn Terraform? And How To Speed Up Your Learning.
- Should You Use Typescript To Write Terraform? (The Terraform CDK)
- Terraform: How To Rename (Instead Of Deleting) A Resource
- The Simplest Possible EC2 Web Server Setup Using Terraform (On AWS)
- What is Terraform? A Simple Definition.
- 10 Terraform Best Practices: For Secure & Fast Infrastructure.
- Should You Commit the Terraform .tfstate File to Git?
- The Ultimate Terraform Workflow: Setup Terraform (And Remote State) With Github Actions
- What Is the Best Way to Learn Terraform?
- Create An AWS S3 Website Using Terraform And Github Actions
- What is Immutable Infrastructure?
- 3 Steps To Migrate Existing Infrastructure To Terraform
- 5 Important Reasons To Learn Terraform Before Cloud Computing.
- Terraform Modules: A Guide To Maintainable Infrastructure As Code
- Declarative vs. Imperative Infrastructure As Code
- Learn The 6 Fundamentals Of Terraform — In Less Than 20 Minutes
- 3 Terraform Features to Help You Refactor Your Infrastructure Effortlessly
- Infrastructure As Code: A Quick And Simple Explanation.
Containers
Observability & Monitoring
- You’re Alerting Wrong: The Why & How Of Setting An AWS Lambda Alarm Using Error Rate Percentages.
- How To Setup Monitoring / Observability On Existing Software (e.g. A Web API): A Practical 5 Step Guide.
- You’re Logging Wrong: What One-Per-Service (“Phat Event”) Logs Are and Why You Need Them.
- How To Get AWS Lambda Logs Into CloudWatch
Software Engineering Careers
- Is An AWS Certification Enough To Get You A Job? (Spoiler Alert: No)
- Can You Learn AWS (And Get Certified) With No Experience? e.g. No IT Background Or Degree
- How Long Will It Take To Learn AWS? And How To Speed The Process Up!
- Best Resources For AWS Certifications: An Extensive & Opinionated Guide (So You Pass The First Time!)
- Best Online Communities For Cloud Engineers (Forums, Chats & More)
- The Secret Of Web Development BootCamps And How To Use Cloud To Your Advantage
- Reader Question: Which AWS Certificates Should You Start With If You’re A Junior?
- Do Cloud Engineers Code?
- What is a Cloud Native Software Engineer?
- The Software Career You Didn’t Think To Consider — Professional Services
- How to Coach: A Cheat Sheet
- Writing A Punchy Junior Software Developer Cover Letter: A Case Study.
- An inside look at my favourite apps
Reader Questions
Book Summaries
Meta
- 2020 Summary: Traffic Growth, The Websites First Income & The Plans For 2021!
- How I Gained Consistent Traffic To My Website Using SEO (And How You Can, Too)
- 2019 Summary: Up & Running With Serverless and Regaining Blogging Motivation
- 2018: A Year In Review
- The one and only thing I’ll be focusing on in 2018
