Introduction
Welcome to the start of a new series of posts where I share some tips about creating a program to learn Cloud Skills (and potentially gain certification) when you only have a minimal training budget.
This follows a journey I’ve taken myself and my team on. It should be valuable both to individuals trying to gain valuable skills and leaders who want to create a training plan for teams with varying levels of experience.
Whilst this is primarily focused on a my team’s journey with Azure Serverless technologies, the same principles can be applied to any of the large cloud providers, and could be extended to any new technology.
Along the way I’ll share some tips for finding time to fit learning around a busy schedule.
Setting the Scene
We had a business critical process that was rock-solid and fault-tolerant. It had run successfully for many years, until one day, at peak processing time, it could no longer cope with the capacity we were throwing at it resulting in delays in processing
The solution was simple and time-honored: queue up work tasks and create a lightweight function that can pull individual tasks to work on, making sure that each task is isolated, then horizontally scale out as many instances of the task processor as necessary to ensure that the tasks are completed in a timely fashion.
My Cloud background is mainly in Kubernetes, with a smattering of AWS, however our organization runs on Azure. I needed to transfer my skills to Azure, ensure that my Leads and Seniors were up to date on the latest services and APIs, and ensure that the Juniors and Mids were also able to work on the codebase. We had a range of exposure to Cloud technologies from very experienced to almost none. As a bonus, if we could work towards recognized qualifications, then everyone could develop their career at the same time.
When we started the process, our company didn’t have a subscription with any of the main learning providers, so keeping the costs to low or zero was important. As we progressed through, my company invested in LinkedIn Learning and Pluralsight, but I had a conversation with an ex-colleague whose company didn’t invest in a learning provider and I was able to share my learning plan with him, and hence I thought I would share these tips for anyone else who might find them valuable.
Next up: Stage One - Exploration!