Landing an Entry Level Cloud Operations Job

This article is for anyone who wants to learn more about getting an entry level Cloud Operations (Cloud Ops) job.

The Cloud Ops role is a great way to break into the tech industry. The position lends itself well to professionals who have a solid foundation of technical skill, but little to no experience. The role provides a great career growth path to engineering and architecture roles.

My first job in tech was the pre-cloud version of this role. My title was “Operations Analyst II”, just a little different than Cloud Ops. I worked for the MSN division at Microsoft on the data backup team. Instead of working with virtual servers and storage, I was walking around data centers, moving tapes from storage to a robotic library, and operating backup software. Good times.

Let’s explore what this role is in more detail.

What does a Cloud Ops Analyst do?

At a high level, this person is responsible for operating cloud systems and applications. You’re the mechanic of the cloud. You didn’t design or build the car, but you are making sure it runs well for years on end.

This includes active monitoring of the health and performance of cloud systems, fixing things that break, and working with developers and architects to make the world a better place.

Job Profile & Qualifications

Now that we have a good idea of what a Cloud Ops Analyst does, lets look at the qualifications. Here’s what I gathered from analyzing various job posts:

• Salary: $88,414 /yr Avg (US data from Glassdoor)

• Formal Education: Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience (though some jobs don’t even mention a degree requirement)

• Job Experience: 2+ years avg, but definitely some open to entry level

• Certificates: No consensus; some job posts do indicate what cloud provider they are using require proficiency in

Missing Qualifications

What do you do if you’re missing qualifications? There are a lot of tactics you can employee to make up for missing qualifications. The bottom line is that you have to show hustle, have good connections, or some combination of the two. You have to find a way to stand out.

Here are some ways you can make up for missing qualifications.

Certifications

There’s a reason why job listings don’t typically have technical certifications as a requirement. They are easier to obtain than degrees, are technology or company centric, and are less relatable. If your potential boss doesn’t have a AWS certification, but did graduate from a university, you can imagine what they would value more.

That said, the topic of this section is “hustle”. Hustle is proving that you can do hard work, and have knowledge and skill in a certain domain. Certifications can do that for you.

Here are some certificates that provide the technical skill for this role:

• Base Computing / Networking / Operating System Certificates:

  • CompTIA A+

  • Linux Professional Institute LPIC-1

  • Windows Server Certifications (if a Windows shop)

• Cloud Providers:

  • AWS Cloud Practitioner

  • AWS Solutions Architect

  • AWS SysOps Administrator

  • Google and Microsoft Cloud Equivalents

Portfolio

Software developers are able to create portfolios of their work and host it on sites like Github. The write code, commit to a repo, and share.

Cloud Ops is a little different, as you’re not writing code. How does one show they can monitor a cloud based system and fix issues that arise? Here are some things you can do:

• Publish screen recording videos of yourself building cloud architectures

• Write How-To articles and post them on a personal blog or third party site (dev.to, hashnode, etc)

• Learn an infrastructure-as-code tool (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) and publish projects to a GitHub portfolio

Volunteering and Internships

Another option is to either volunteer or intern somewhere. When I graduated college, I did a 3 month non-paid internship at the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle. That helped me get some real world experience, and lined me up for a paid job.

If you’re having a hard time getting hired, you can look into these opportunities to boost your resume.

Conclusion

This article explored the Cloud Operations Analyst role in detail. It provided a summary of the job, explored the common tasks that need to be completed, and gave some suggestions on how to qualify for the role.

In the next post I will provide some guidance on how to structure your job search.