Q&A with our 7x AWS Certified cloud engineer Danny Steenman

Our Cloud Engineers have super interesting hobbies. Some are cloud related, some not so much, but all of them are inspiring in some way. This is why we would like to show you what our CloudNation rebels are up to in their free time. Yesterday Cloud Engineer Danny Steenman did an 'Ask Me Anything' on his personal Twitter account. These are some of the questions and answers that we thought were too interesting to keep from you!

He got a LOT of response to his original tweet. Here are some of the most interesting replies: 

Q: "Is it necessary to start as a web dev before venturing into the cloud?"
A: "Nope, I never did and I ended up just fine."

Q: "Which AWS certification matters the most in industry?"
A: "AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional"

Q: "What's the future in AWS Cloud? Lambda?"
A: "I can only speculate on this, but I see more services transitioning to a managed counterpart. This means regular OPS becomes obsolete over time since you can deploy services without having to manage the underlying infra. We will see more of this in the future."

Q: "Is it a must to have programming or coding experience to migrate into cloud computing?"
A: "Yes, automation is super important in the Cloud. Therefore it’s important to get familiar with programming."

 

Q: "Why’d you pick cloud engineering as a career?"
A: "Good question, long answer: read Break out of your Comfort Zone as an Engineer
tldr; When I did my thesis I got immediately hooked by the capabilities that the Cloud offered back then (AS, HA, Elasticity etc..) Plus I got sick of maintaining stateful servers like pets and building them more like cattle.

Q: "Do you advise youngsters to deploy apps the old fashioned way with web servers and all - to get some battle scars and know what's going on in the engine room? Or skip that and go all in serverless?"
A: "If there is enough demand in your area for only serverless, then go serverless! Ops will eventually get obsolete, so if you don’t have to work on it then you can skip it. But the truth is that most companies are still migrating to the cloud, so don’t expect all in on serverless."

Q: "Frontend engineers and designers have portfolios, backend engineers have GitHub repos. What do cloud engineers have to show proficiency?"
A: "For public activities: Technical blog posts , open source contributions, certifications. Stuff that I build for my clients are mostly under NDA (can’t be shared publicly), but during a tech interview you can explain the concepts of what you applied to show your experience."

Do you have any other questions for Danny? Read his blog or contact him on Twitter.