Cloudy with a Chance of Success: 7 Tips and Tricks for Surviving Your First Cloud Engineering Experience

In this talk, I will explore the challenges and opportunities of starting out as a cloud engineer, and provide practical tips and tricks for overcoming these challenges and having a successful experience. These are:

1. First principles - get a handle on the fundamental concepts of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.

2. Keep your cool - sort and understand the complex set of tools given to you.

3. Define, accelerate, and strengthen your developer loop so you can focus on your code.

4. Find your “Steve” - identify the person, inside or outside your team, who knows everything, loves to help, and is open-minded.

5. Try and discover open source tools for testing locally without deployment.

6. Understand the processes involved in deployments, and shadow them if you can.

7. Document your blockers. Keeping a record of every blocker you encounter, and how you resolved it, is a fantastic way to internalize your learning and to become more self-sufficient.