Five years ago, I went from a complete beginner with no prior cloud experience to landing my first job as a cloud engineer in just 90 days. I'm going to share exactly how I did it, all the free resources I used, and the projects I built. If you stay

until the end, I'll also give you the exact roadmap you can follow for 2025. By the way, join over 10,000 engineers accelerating their cloud journey and grab my beginner's guide to the cloud for free. Link in the description. So, if you're new here, hi, I'm

Lman, and today I help businesses scale and secure their AWS infrastructure with my own consultancy. But five years ago, I was actually working at a tech company as a technical architect, and in meetings I kept hearing about AWS, infrastructure code, CI/CD pipelines, but

these were just buzzwords at the time. They didn't really mean anything to me, and I know that might sound a little strange because I was in a technical role, but I was just working on old, legacy, clunky systems that had nothing to do with these modern technologies. There

was just a lot of energy at the time around cloud computing, and it really sparked my curiosity. Then one day we were in a project meeting, and we were talking about moving our applications and our systems to the cloud, and that's when I realized I really don't know enough

about this topic. So I got this burst of motivation and started to research cloud computing that very evening, looking at what it is and why we're even moving to the cloud—like, what's the purpose, what's the benefit, you know? And I was looking

At the time, the data industry was much smaller, and many companies were still on-premise.  Not that the cloud was new—AWS had been around for about 14 years. My research indicated that the cloud industry would more than quadruple in size over the next decade, reaching $1.6 trillion by 2030. That convinced me it was the industry for me, given the growth and investment. Even my own company was moving everything to the cloud, meaning the opportunities would be endless. Looking back, I was right.  You know, sometimes you look back and...

honestly, I've made plenty of mistakes. Maybe if you're watching this and thinking, 'What is he talking about?',...

for example, when I was 16 or 17, I started selling phone cases online around 2012. I kept all the stock in my home garage and had a working website. Someone was able to make a payment through PayPal, and within a few days, I got my first sale—someone in London bought a phone case for about $20. I looked up the buyer and discovered he was a lawyer. Now, this sounds ridiculous, but I got scared.

I thought he was going to get me into trouble, so I refunded him and closed the store immediately. Why did I tell you all this? In life, you make mistakes—it's normal. But I learned that you only have to make one...

mistake once to learn from it.  And that's the point.

So that's what I want to share with you all today.

Good decision, and all your other mistakes are forgotten. One great decision can change the whole trajectory of your life. And if you're watching this and you want to break into the cloud, you're literally one step away from changing your life completely. Everything you've done wrong up

until this point won't matter. So, after researching that evening, I took a big risk—well, it seemed like a big risk to everyone in my life: my family, my friends, and my colleagues. But for me, it was just another day. I had a good job

paying me well enough, but I realized that for me to delve deep into the cloud and fully commit, I couldn't possibly juggle that while also running a YouTube channel. So I took a slightly calculated risk and quit my job. I handed in my notice period,

which is only like two weeks, and I was genuinely so happy. It felt like such a relief at the time because I wanted to learn the cloud, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. Now you're probably thinking, why did I quit that job when we

were moving everything to the cloud? Now you see, these big corporations—everything moves really slowly, especially in the area I was working at. It needed a lot of project planning, it needed a lot of reviews, it needed a lot of approvals. So that simple application migration would have taken maybe a year,

two years, because it was such an old system and we had very old ways of working. Because I wanted to move fast, and I knew this is where I wanted to be, I just had to go all in. You see, I had a lot of external pressure from people

telling me that I was making a big mistake, or one of my coworkers said I'd actually be back in my old job in a few months. But I didn't let them discourage me. Now, do I actually recommend anyone quitting their job today? Probably not.

But I really think it depends on your specific situation. I had saved up enough expenses that would actually last me 90 days, so I had a little bit of security. But I also created this deadline of 90 days artificially for myself, so I would actually get the job done.

Essentially, fill up the things you have to do with the time that you allocate. It's known as Parkinson's Law, which states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. So if you have a whole day to do an assignment, you take the full day, even if it

actually takes you two hours to complete it. So you spend your whole day on it. So that's why I created this 90-day deadline to really back myself into a corner and accelerate my transition. Could I have done it in a year? Sure. But if you want to be someone that gets

things done, you've got to tap into that primal nature that we all have: fight or flight mode. Even if you have to create artificial deadlines, we just work better under pressure, and that's the reality. And by the way, if you're looking to switch to the cloud just like I did, then

consider joining my Cloud Engineer Academy. I've used my 10 years of experience in tech and five years in cloud to compile the exact roadmap to take you from beginner to job-ready cloud engineer in just 90 days. Now, don't just

Take my word for it; go check out Jay's story. He went from banking with no IT experience to cloud hire in just a few months. Some of our students have already gotten jobs; some of our students are interviewing at big companies like AWS. But go check it out! Link in description.

Now then, after quitting my job, my first question was to figure out where to start learning—specifically, which cloud platform to learn. I actually chose AWS as they were the market leader at the time, which means more job opportunities and even more learning resources. I then realized, okay, I need to understand the

key foundations of cloud computing and what it's built on, and I identified four key areas. First was networking. I needed to understand how data moves across the internet, how IP addresses work, what a DNS does, and how networks are structured. This knowledge would be crucial for setting up cloud infrastructure

correctly. Secondly, operating systems—specifically Linux. Now, most cloud servers run on Linux, so I needed to get comfortable with the command line, doing some basic operations and also system administration. Third was virtualization. This is the technology that makes cloud computing possible, allowing multiple

virtual servers to run on a single physical machine. Now, this concept helped me grasp how cloud platforms work at a fundamental level. And finally, databases. Almost everything that we do in the cloud involves storing and retrieving data, so I needed to understand how both SQL and NoSQL concepts actually worked. I

approached learning strategically. I started with the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, using the free resources from freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel. I studied intensely for a single week, focusing on understanding not just what each service did, but why you would use it.

Use it now. After passing the cloud practitioner exam, I felt accomplished, but I quickly learned a hard truth: certifications alone wouldn't get me a job. In fact, if you're new to the cloud, you're probably not going to like hearing this, especially if you're on the...

...path to get certified. To me, certifications are as good as worthless. Don't think for a moment employers actually care about your certifications. They're only valuable for one thing, and that's why I still recommend getting certified because it provides you a structured way of learning and guides...

...you through your journey at the start, especially when you're not sure what to learn. So the mistake I made was that I straight away started applying for jobs after I got certified, but I wasn't getting any interviews. I realized that my resume may have been...

...missing one key thing: employers wanted practical experience. They wanted to see that I had built hands-on projects. For example, today I wouldn't hire anyone for my consultancy if they don't have any hands-on projects built. I skip straight past the certifications and the...

...education part of people's resumes. I look at the portfolio projects and any prior work experience that they've got. So I realized I needed to build projects to actually land a job, but I didn't know if that meant coding, like, what does building a project even mean? So I knew I...

...had to learn some basic scripting and automation with Python. Now, back in the day, I did some front-end software development. Now, I absolutely hated that role, but it taught me some core programming skills, and I already had experience in Python. Now, obviously, it's worth noting that application coding...

It isn't mandatory as a cloud engineer, and I've actually had plenty of colleagues that didn't know how to code at all. I do recommend coding if you want to have an advantage over other candidates when you apply for jobs. In fact, the more

you can code, the better you are as a cloud engineer. So you need to learn how to code, but you don't need to learn how to code an application; you're working on the infrastructure level, scripting automation. So coding gives you a natural advantage over everyone else, and at some

point in your cloud computing journey, you also need to learn infrastructure as code. Terraform is one of the most popular IAC tools, and even having programming experience with languages like Bash, TypeScript, or Python will make learning Terraform significantly easier. This is because all of these programming

languages share similar concepts like variables, loops, functions, and if/else statements. If you want to learn coding today for free, then go check out freeCodeCamp on YouTube; that's how I learned to code. And as I said, I realized I needed to build projects, and my first one involved

setting up an EC2 virtual machine, which helped me understand key concepts like instance types, security groups, and SSH connectivity. I then expanded my knowledge by creating a storage solution that combined Amazon S3 for object storage and Amazon RDS for relational databases. This experience provided

practical insights into cloud storage architecture and database management. Now, with my coding skills, I also built a web app and deployed it onto S3 and CloudFront as a static website. Now, I originally built these using the AWS Cloud console, but as cloud engineers,

That's not how we build in the real world, so then I rebuilt every project using Terraform, which I've mentioned before is the most popular infrastructure-as-code tool. I then rebuilt that web application on different AWS services like Beanstalk and ECS, and that's how I really learned how

to build things practically by building, rebuilding, tearing things down, breaking things, and rebuilding using different architectures. That's why I always recommend to people who ask me what project they should build: focus on the fundamentals and get practical experience with different services and deployment models. So take a web

application; make sure you've got a front end, back end, and database, and you can insert data from your web app to your database. Right? That's just a fundamental application. Then what you want to do is you want to figure out all the different ways that you can deploy this web

application on AWS, for example. So how can you host this web application on AWS? What are five different ways that you can do this? They all have different pros and cons. What are those pros and cons? So then go and build that web application on all of these

different AWS services and make them work. You will learn so much from that experience. You'll see the pros and cons, the advantages and disadvantages of using this infrastructure versus that infrastructure. That gets you the real practical experience that you need when you start working on client projects

because it's one thing knowing how to build something on S3 or AWS EC2, but it's another thing understanding why you should build it on EC2 versus S3 versus ECS versus Beanstalk. Unless you work with these services and build your web

If you build similar projects using different services, you'll never understand why you should use one over the other. That's the biggest mistake I see people make; they don't understand how these services interact.

And how these different services compare, because they all have different pros and cons. With my certifications and projects complete, I turned my attention to job hunting. I completely revamped my LinkedIn profile, posting almost every day, highlighting my cloud projects and new certifications, but

I didn't stop there. I developed a specific strategy for landing interviews. Every time I applied for a job, I messaged the recruiter or hiring manager on LinkedIn. This really works, and I suggest you use this on LinkedIn as well to land a job. Now,

remember, recruiters are hired by tech companies to find talent, and they're all looking on LinkedIn. In fact, 95% of recruiters use LinkedIn to search and contact candidates, so you have to be posting every day, making connections, and messaging recruiters after submitting your applications. Now, with the

interview process, it varies from company to company. Some require take-home tests; others had hands-on technical assessments; and some just wanted a simple technical discussion. I prepared for each interview by reviewing my projects and researching the company to understand

what they do and their core values. I don't think you need to overprepare for interviews because all the learning you've done and the projects you've built have prepared you, so don't stress about it when you get to the

In the interview process, you know what you've done better than anyone else at some point. It just becomes a numbers game; you're going to have to apply for hundreds of jobs, and you have to treat the process as your full-time job before you even get hired. You know, wake

up early, get dressed and ready to go, grab a coffee, and set your daily target. Let's say you want to apply for 10 jobs every day; then you just create a tracker, like an Excel spreadsheet, to keep track of when and what job you applied for.

There are recruiters that you message, and if you receive any sort of interview that way, you get to see your progress, and it just brings everything together very nicely. That's exactly what I did. I eventually landed my first job as a cloud engineer just before the 90

day period. And to be honest, it wasn't an easy journey because it takes time and dedication. Like the actual learning part, the building projects, and applying for jobs—to be honest, that's the easy part. Instead, making real changes in life takes commitment and time, and that's

often the biggest hurdle. It's not that people don't want better for themselves, but sticking to a plan and putting in consistent work is where things get tough. Change doesn't happen overnight, but showing up every day and staying patient with the process is what makes

the difference. Everyone is just too distracted nowadays, so actually, if you're still here, you're already ahead of most people. And if you're starting your journey now or it's underway, then here is the exact roadmap that I would follow for 2025: Master the fundamentals.

Linux networking and basic programming with Python, along with databases, but also don't forget virtualization. Choose your cloud platform; I still recommend AWS due to its market dominance. You want to learn the essential AWS services: EC2, IAM, VPC, and Bedrock. You want to build

beginner projects: portfolio websites, task tracking systems, you know, an image-sharing app. Then you want to get certified: Cloud Practitioner, followed by the Solutions Architect Associate. Then you want to learn the essential cloud tools: Terraform for infrastructure as code and CI/CD with GitHub Actions. Then you want

to master more advanced AWS services: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and SageMaker. Then you want to build complex projects like an event-driven notification system and an AI book recommendation engine. While you're doing this, you need to build your LinkedIn presence with posts, project

documentations, and insights. Then you want to apply for entry-level jobs like Junior Cloud Engineer, Cloud Support Associate, or any cloud-adjacent role. Now, if that was a lot to take in, don't worry; I've created an in-depth breakdown of this exact path, so just click here to

watch the complete roadmap to becoming a cloud engineer in 2025.

From Zero to Cloud Engineer in 90 days | Step by Step Roadmap

From Zero to Cloud Engineer in 90 days | Step by Step Roadmap

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