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Ask HN: How did you learn Cloud Mastery and System Administration

1 points by Oksitaine ↗ HN
I've been a fullstack developer for a while, using backend services like Vercel, Resend, Supabase... However, working on large apps in terms of users, the costs of these services have become too much for me.

I'm now looking to train myself with cloud structures like AWS or OVH, containerize my apps with Docker, make them scalable with Kubernetes... However, this is complicated because I can't figure out where to learn.

For those who are good in these areas, I was wondering, where did you learn?? Any particular books? YouTube videos? Online courses?...

7 comments

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gtvwill
Why? If cost is prohibitive maybe you need less AWS and more Ububtu Server. That is to say, host your own. You'd be surprised how much host you can get out of a few nucs strewn across the country.

AWS isn't actually that great for most users, I mean how many of you are actually going to need overnight scaling to x thousand servers? Probably bugger all. But folks sure do like paying the premium for it!

Oksitaine
I took a quick look at AWS to check the prices... I have to say that for serverless services like Lambda, we're not looking at very attractive reductions compared to Vercel where I'm currently...

In the end, I'm not going to waste my time trying to save pennies... However, for other AI services, it's rather interesting because $5/hours for an A100 on Replicate is exorbitant.

hnarn
I'm just going to play the devil's advocate for a second and say that if you feel like you don't understand the "infrastructure" side enough, don't start by learning one proprietary cloud service like AWS, or one extremely complex orchestration engine like Kubernetes.

If you are a developer, you will (likely/hopefully) not be managing Kubernetes clusters anyway, so you don't need to know all the plumbing. Same thing goes for AWS or Azure or whatever, your $CURRENT_WORKPLACE will (hopefully) have duct tape in place to deploy to these things.

If you want to become a more valuable developer, learn the basics that are true everywhere. Linux is Linux, and Docker is Docker, so start with that, and understand how to tie them into CI (in whatever platform you use).

Being a developer that can actually troubleshoot platform issues is much more valuable than being a developer that knows every single service offered by Amazon.

And if you lack motivation, do what everyone else does: start self hosting.

Oksitaine
I was heading in the direction you just suggested. Before going further, I'm going to reinforce my knowledge of Docker and use Linux OS to set up my servers.

Rushing straight into AWS to manage my infrastructure wouldn't be reasonable, and I risk being less productive for a worse result... Especially since AWS prices aren't that far off for my cloud services for my site compared to Vercel, it's not urgent.

hnarn
I've been using Hetzner personally, I'm sure there's others that are equally good but the pricing is great and I've never had a problem with them.