I Wish I Learned Cloud This Way From the Start

If you’re learning cloud computing, you’ve probably had this experience.

Whether it’s Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud, you go through a long, tedious signup process—and finally make it into the management console.

And then… you’re staring at hundreds of different services and products. Thousands of settings and options. On top of that, there’s a dizzying range of certifications, mountains of training courses, and endless documentation.

It’s like taking someone who’s never flown a plane and dropping them straight into the cockpit of a fighter jet. There are so many dials, it looks like a clock shop.

Where do you even start? Which platform should you learn first? In what order? And what’s actually worth learning?

Start with Terraform

Here’s my advice: before you dive into the technical details of any particular cloud platform, learn Terraform first. Make it your foundation before you start learning any of these platforms.

Why Terraform?

Because Terraform is designed to work across many different cloud platforms. In other words, it’s built to connect to almost every cloud platform out there. So, from the very beginning, its design had to address one question:

How do you bring all these different platforms, each with its own way of doing things, under a common framework?

And that’s why the most commonly used 20% of Terraform’s concepts and skills can cover 80% of the situations and needs you’ll encounter when running real systems in the cloud.

Once you’ve mastered that core 20%, you can take what you’ve learned and apply it to whichever cloud platform you choose next. You’ll be able to quickly connect the concepts and skills that matter most in the industry to how things work on that specific platform.

That’s the most efficient way to learn.