Why a Developer Should Be a Bit of a Cloud Engineer: The Need for Cloud Services

A Short Background

I characterize myself as a slothful engineer due to the specificity of my behavior: rather than duplicating, mentioning different issues in my project, and setting up new appliances to be more efficient, I would be grateful for the opportunity and get back on my way.

My first job as a professional started in the entertainment industry where I had to do my projects really quickly before the deadline was over; moreover, it was not possible to use high-end tools or spend a lot of time researching and integrating peculiar properties. That is the reason why I decided to spend some overtime hours researching and showing my teammates how a few specific tools could improve the process, and show how to have a greater impact in solving technical problems.

A big part of us do not work on innovative technologies: we solve customer issues. It is clear that I do not want to accomplish the task that is already done by a huge number of engineers. The most important thing is to achieve satisfaction from my clients. In that case, it is easier and more practical to use cloud tools. While you do not know all the computing features, and although you can determine a subject in broad terms (i.e., signing in with social accounts, storing some data reliably, and selling different services to cross the demand line), these tools will be helpful. However, a lot of people think that cloud servers are more like warehouse computing machines, but it is definitely a widespread misunderstanding.

Time for a Change

There was a time when I was responsible for controlling the functionality of the internal part of the server software, building APIs, and designing databases. My job would have been done more easily and quickly if only I had found out about cloud services earlier. I could not always ask my teammates for help in promoting the canal improvement or tracking and removing production mistakes. So, I spared my time to learn how to make my job more efficient. The expansion of my knowledge and skillset gave me the opportunity to make my own career and implement ideas into private pet projects.

I often stopped my own cases until completion before I discovered cloud computing for personal usage because it seemed to be more difficult than I planned and could manage. However, after I gained a sufficient understanding of the working system, I could finish my tasks, and even use it to finish unrelated projects (hosting podcasts, for example). It was definitely clear that a lot of different podcasts may not make money for themselves, so I agreed with the thought that I would rather quit than continue in expenses.

Then I decided to do some research and after that, I found out three key features about the cost of hosting podcasts:

1. Hosting the public audio and image files

2. Transferring or reformatting an XML file for the appropriate aggregators

3. Monitoring episode plays

However, there is a catch in this operation, and it includes the following question: is there a necessity to pay from 10 to 15 dollars a month for hosting my files if the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offers to pull off the same case for pennies (approximately 3 dollars)? If I wanted to do it myself, it would also mean that the data and content were not processed by third parties. To begin with, I organized storage for graphic and audio files. After that, I wrote an XML file for the podcast aggregators and sent it to the same repository. To make it easier for me to track playback, I registered these files and analyzed them using the Amazon Athena service. In the end, I realized that I didn't have many spectators, but it didn't change my AWS bill, which was already $1 per month.

Practical Tips for Starting Using Cloud Services Without Pain

Now I am sure that I have convinced you to become a cloud engineer (or at least research cloud services), and therefore I decided to give some quick tips that would have been useful to me before I had started:

• You need to turn on notifications about incoming bills before you start doing anything, and of course, make sure it works as you think. Hypothetically, you could follow the seminar or tutorial, completely unaware of this action, and subsequently, get an enormous bill. These are real-life stories :(.

• It's better to get as many free credits as possible. Your provider for your business will compete with other cloud hosting providers, and therefore it is better to make them deserve it.

• The documentation itself often focuses not on user stories, but on functions. Independent content-creators become a great option to fill in the gaps. Some blogs or journals can be such an assistant to sites like DZone.com, DEV.to, Medium.com, etc.

• It would be great to change just one setting at once. This will help not to make a mistake in the first steps.

• It is too difficult to understand access and identity management (IAM).  I could tell you about some difficult cases in AWS.

Summary

If I managed to inspire you to learn something new and create it, then I would be happy to get a response from you. Learning new tools and approaches is good: it will give you an advantage, but it is even more interesting to teach other people how to use these tools. This option will increase your influence at times.

P.S.

I decided to write this note as a little notice because it seems HR specialists (and other people) who are looking for developers already seem to imply that developers should at least know about cloud technologies. This is fair from my point of view.

This is clearly demonstrated by the graph. Below is a chart of search queries to Google for the year worldwide: