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FORREST BRAZEAL: Well, hi.
I'm Forrest Brazeal.
I'm a Cloud builder and educator.
And I work here at Google Cloud.
Over the years, as I talk to members of the Cloud community,
I constantly get asked versions of the same question, which
is, how do I get into a Cloud or DevOps engineering
role from what we might call a traditional IT career?
So you might be a Windows Server admin or a DBA.
You might be racking and stacking servers or working
in a NOC, but you're doing all that
in the context of a traditional data center, not in the Cloud.
I actually started my career that way
as well doing many of the things I just
mentioned before moving into a cloud role several years ago.
And in this video, we're going to lay out
a path for how you can make that transition from a legacy IT
career to a role where you get to build on Google Cloud
Services.
So let's dive right in.
OK.
The first question you're going to want to ask yourself is why.
What's the point of choosing a Cloud role when maybe I already
have a career that's going fine.
I'm in a good groove.
And an easy answer might be the Cloud market
is very hot right now.
Take a look at these numbers here.
Look at these salaries associated with Google Cloud
certifications.
This data is from Global Knowledge.
And to be clear, I didn't cherry pick this.
Those top two numbers you see there for Google Cloud certs,
those aren't just the top two paying Google Cloud certs.
They aren't just the top two paying cloud certs
in the world.
Those are the top two certs anywhere in IT as of 2021.
Just to be very clear, you know and I know that certifications
are not the whole story here.
It's very difficult to get hired into a cloud role
unless you can show some hands-on experience working
with cloud, even if you've already
got experience working in a traditional IT role.
So how are you going to get that experience?
And this is kind of a unique problem for you,
because you may not be able to just go back to square one
and start again with schooling or something like that.
You've already got a career.
Maybe you've got a family.
You can't take two steps back to take one step forward.
You've got to find a path to this cloud role that's
going to enable you to augment your skills without starting
over.
So here's what I recommend that you do.
We're going to cover three steps to your cloud career coming out
of traditional IT.
We might call them the three IT cloud commandments.
The first one is that you need to exploit
your unfair advantage.
What do I mean by this?
You'll hear this term used a lot in the startup world
where founders talk about finding the one thing they
do better than anybody else and just really doubling down
on that.
Well, if you're watching this video,
your unfair advantage may be that you're already
employed in some form of tech.
IT is in your blood a little bit as you were.
And that's going to give you a tremendous advantage
relative to other people who are trying to break
into cloud for the first time.
But you've got to access this advantage.
And that's going to likely look taking advantage
of the existing opportunities you
have to get close to cloud in your professional context.
Cloud builds on fundamentals that have been around
for a long time--
compute, networking, storage, all forms of access control.
These are things that you understand that you've
got some context with.
So why not figure out how to cloudify those existing skills,
how to turn those skills into cloud versions of themselves?
There's three steps to doing this.
The first step is simply to build the thing
that you already know.
So let's say that you're a SQL Server DBA, like I used to be.
OK.
Well, let's see if you can stand up
a SQL Server in Google Cloud.
You can use the console for this.
You can point and click around.
The point is just to transfer your knowledge of standing up
a SQL Server on the old data center in the virtual machine
to standing it up in Google Cloud.
Second step.
Once you've done that, go ahead and automate that same process.
So now instead of pointing and clicking, instead of
using click ops, you're going to use some form of automation.
You're going to use something like Terraform
to automate the standing up of that underlying server.
You're going to use some scripting or automation
to make sure that that SQL Server is initialized
the same way every time.
You're going to use some form of source control
to make sure that you keep track of all that configuration.
And you're going to use some sort of a CI/CD pipeline,
we assume, to make sure that that code gets
from your laptop into the cloud the same way
every time without you touching it in between.
And then once you've done that, the third step
is to try to reproduce the same idea using Managed Cloud
Services.
So instead of SQL Server, you might say, hey,
I wonder if I could achieve the same results using Google Cloud
SQL or maybe Google Cloud Spanner.
Give it a try.
It's going to expand the circle of what you already
know to encompass the cloud.
Now, on the other hand, you may see things happening
in your company that are cloud related that you are not
part of and don't feel like you have the ability
to access right now.
There might be a cloud engineering department
over there across the hall.
And you see what they're doing.
And it looks really cool, but it's just not
related to your current job at all.
In that case, I would recommend go talk to those people.
See if you can sit down and have lunch with them.
Ask to pick their brain.
Ask for some mentorship.
Buy them coffee.
Max out your access to colleagues who
do what you would like to do.
That's part of your unfair advantage right now is
having access to those people and to their problems.
Who knows?
Worst case, you're going to learn a lot about what they do.
You're going to get great advice from them on where you
need to focus your skilling up.
Best case, they might have an internal role opening up soon
that you are top of mind for.
Just leverage the heck out of those connections.
Only good things are going to happen.
But-- and this is important-- if those opportunities aren't
coming to you naturally, you don't
need to sit around forever and wait for them.
Ultimately, it's not your team that's
responsible for the trajectory of your career.
It's not your employer.
It is you who's responsible for it.
So if the cloud opportunities are not coming to you,
you need to go out and get them.
And that brings us to our second IT to Cloud commandment.
And the second commandment is to boost targeted skills.
And I'm being very deliberate in saying it that way because,
again, as we've said, you may not
have time to kind of burn the house down
and start from square one with going back to school
and building up every skill from scratch.
You've got to figure out where your gaps are.
And you've got to make very intentional
targeted improvements to those gaps.
There are four areas that you can dive into here.
And the first is you have to learn to code.
There's a reason that people who come from software development
backgrounds tend to find it much easier to get in the Cloud
than people who come from traditional IT backgrounds.
And that is because code is a non-negotiable if you want
to become a cloud engineer.
You're not able to just point and click or use the GUI
to manage things anymore.
You have to be able to automate if you're
going to keep up with the massive scale of a cloud
environment.
So if you don't have a cloud--
if you don't have a language you already know, try Python.
It's pretty ubiquitous in cloud environments.
But code is the barrier.
And code is the bridge to a cloud engineering role.
You don't necessarily have to be an elite code person.
You don't have to be crunching algorithms.
That's not going to come up a lot in a cloud interview.
But you do need to be able to perform basic automation
and data manipulation tasks that do come up every day in a cloud
role.
Learn to code.
Second thing.
Learn the basics of Linux and networking.
And this may be something that feels
more core to what you've been doing in IT and that's great.
But you will need to remember the Linux file
system, basic Linux commands.
You'll want to make sure you understand the fundamentals
of containerization.
And of course, you'll want to the core networking concepts
like the IP Protocol and all the other protocols
that layer on top of it, DNS, subnets, all that good stuff.
Again, some of this may be more familiar to you.
You've touched it before.
There's lots of courses and videos
out there you can use as a refresher.
But these are not going away in the cloud.
They're only becoming more important
because so many systems are built on top of them.
And you will want to make sure that you're fresh on those
when you go into an interview.
So code, Linux, and networking.
Third thing.
If you want to get a cloud job, believe it or not,
you actually should know a little bit
about the cloud itself.
In this video, we're talking about Google Cloud.
So how are you going to learn about Google Cloud?
I recommend Google Cloud Skills Boost.
It's Google's own platform for training you on Google Cloud.
And you can check out the infrastructure modernization
track there.
It's got a nice combination of hands-on learning
and certification prep.
Yeah.
We talked about how certifications maybe
have some limitations, but I do think it's important for you
to have a Google Cloud certification
if you're trying to transition into a Google Cloud role.
And given where you are in your career,
I would recommend you go after a professional level
certification like the Google Cloud Professional Architect.
It's going to be difficult, but it's
going to signal that you're serious, that you're
a pro on this subject.
And given where you are, I think that's going
to be necessary for you.
Code.
Linux and networking.
Go deep on Google Cloud.
And then finally, you're going to want
to have some familiarity with open source tooling.
Whatever cloud provider you go to work on,
there's going to be certain tools that
pop up in almost every shop.
Doing automation?
I've already said it.
Terraform is probably going to be involved in some way.
Working with containers?
Kubernetes is probably going to be on the table.
These are open source.
They travel.
They're portable between clouds.
Take some time to learn those.
Use something like Kubernetes the Hard Way
from Kelsey Hightower.
Figure out what Kubernetes is, how it works,
what problems it's good for solving.
With Terraform, learn how to deploy some cloud services.
And this brings us to a piece of advice that should tie together
all four of the areas I just mentioned,
which is before you start interviewing,
you'll want to build a couple of hands-on projects.
What do I mean by that?
Take these cloud skills you've learned
and actually create something that's real, that's live,
that's out there in the world, that you can use as a story
during an interview.
I'm very serious about this.
For a couple of years, I've been running
a community initiative called the Cloud Resume Challenge.
It's free.
You can do it on Google Cloud.
And it'll get you up close and personal with almost everything
I just mentioned.
Give you something that you can talk about in an interview.
You can check that out at Cloudresumechallenge.dev.
OK.
So let's say you've exploited your unfair advantage as
much as you can.
You found your skills gaps.
You've plugged them as much as you can.
And now here you are in interviews.
And you're still not getting traction on that cloud engineer
or cloud architect role that you wanted.
Don't worry.
This brings us to the third of our IT
to Cloud commandments, which is you may need
to take a stepping stone role, not moving backward but taking
an intermediate step before you get to your end destination.
And there's a lot of different roles
you can take that'll move you closer to the cloud.
I'm not going to be exhaustive here on what I mention,
but I'm going to list several that I've seen
be helpful to a lot of people.
Number one-- and this is the first thing I would try--
you can look for an IT admin role that has a little bit more
of a hybrid aspect to it.
So while cloud qualifications are not a must
in order for you to get hired, you
know when you look at that company's environment
that they have some stuff on-premises
and they have some stuff in the cloud.
And either they're going to be moving the on-premises stuff
to the cloud or they're going to have both of these environments
around for a while.
And so even though you're probably
getting hired based on your traditional qualifications,
you know that you're probably going
to be migrating to the cloud right
along with these workloads.
So you've got some cloud advancement,
some cloud skilling up that's built
into your professional role.
We talked about wanting to get that
with exploiting your unfair advantage internally,
but this would be looking for a company
where you can do that if you can't do it
where you are right now.
So look into that hybrid IT admin role.
Second thing you might want to check out,
you might look into what we might call a cloud engineering
adjacent role.
So there's a lot of companies--
Google does this.
A lot of their partners do this that
have these roles called Technical Account Manager
or TAM, Technical Program Manager or TPM.
These are roles that are not technically engineering roles,
but they are very technical.
A lot of times, deep traditional IT experience
is a big plus when you're getting hired into these roles.
And you'll be hands-on with customers.
You'll be hands-on with Google Cloud solutions day in
and day out.
These can be a great way for you to transition
into a true cloud engineering role over time.
Third thing-- and this might be more interesting
if you're a little earlier in your career,
would be to become a cloud support
engineer at Google Cloud or another of the major cloud
providers.
This is kind of like the help desk of the Cloud.
But instead of turning people's laptops on and off,
you'll be helping them troubleshoot
cloud administration issues.
Great way to get up close and personal with a huge variety
of cloud tasks.
You'll get very hands-on and it will set you up
for more advanced roles in the future.
And then finally-- and this may surprise you--
there actually can be a lot of value to becoming
a technical trainer.
Believe it or not, teaching someone something
is still one of the best ways to learn the thing.
And I've seen a lot of people, especially in my time
working at A Cloud Guru and Pluralsight,
make this fluid career transition back and forth
between training and being a hands on cloud engineer.
It actually does work.
It's interesting to try.
Now remember, there's no law saying
that if you do take one of these intermediate positions
that you are stuck in it for three to four years.
I mean, this could be like a three to six
month slingshot opportunity for you
where you build some experience and then you're
ready to boomerang onto that cloud engineering opportunity
as soon as it comes open.
Remember what we said.
The cloud market is very hot.
And as soon as you start racking up
this professional experience, those inbound LinkedIn
connections are going to start rolling in.
That's just reality.
In conclusion, big finish.
Take an incremental path to the cloud.
Don't go backwards.
Instead, maximize your current advantage wherever you can.
Take advantage of the people that you're
close to that understand cloud.
Take advantage of your current professional work
and cloudify it wherever you can.
When that doesn't go far enough, try
to boost targeted skills to close the gaps
and make yourself more attractive to employers.
That includes certification.
That includes hands-on projects, probably
the most important thing we've touched on in this video.
And then finally, if that's not quite getting you
to a true cloud engineering role,
consider one of these hybrid or stepping stone roles
that will get you where you want to be
without taking you backwards.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen today.
I hope you'll like and subscribe.
And make sure to join us next time
as we bring you more advice on cracking the Google Cloud
career.