Note; #likei'm5 series

This is a series of articles where I seek to break down complex topics for fellow beginners, just as I am learning. this article is for persons who are not from a technical background like myself and are seeking to transition into tech. Experts keep off.. you may be pissed.

Do I need to be a coder before I can be a Cloud Engineer?...........This is the primary question on the mind of most persons who are looking to transition into cloud engineering. most especially if they aren't from a technical background. Do I need to know how to code? what language will I have to learn?

To start with, what is Cloud Engineering? To understand cloud engineering, we need to understand the concept of cloud first. and to understand cloud, We need to have a basic understanding of how the internet works.

The internet is simply a medium of communication through a network of wires connected around the world. so how does that work? you may ask. infrastructure companies lay wires on the sea bed connecting countries to countries. these wires then connect computers to computers.

Whenever you search for something on the internet, or whenever you ask for information on say, your Facebook account, you are simply getting that information from another computer. your phone or laptop is simply connecting to another computer over the wires.

This computer is called a server and its not like your regular computer. these are giant computers sitting somewhere in the world, patiently sitting and waiting for requests from you with access to information. upon receiving your requests, these giant guys process your requests and send your requests answers back to you through wires.

The information travel through the wires with the speed to light to get to you, the wires then transmit information wirelessly to the telecommunication masts nearest to you, then the mast transmit the information to your receiver. Your receiver in this instance refers to your phone or your laptop; which ever one you are using to access the internet.

So for you to be able to access the information that you need or services that you need, some company or business have to store that information on a server, so that you can access it. say for instance, you want to watch a movie on your Netflix app, the movie that you want to watch is stored on a server somewhere across the globe, you request the movie you want, and the movie is sent to you by the server over the wires.

Remember I said earlier that servers are giant computers, not only are they giant computers, they are expensive to acquire, require top skills to configure and also require constant maintenance.

So for a company like Netflix, they would have to buy their own servers, configure, then maintain. This created 2 disjunctive problems.

The storage space on the server may become used up as Netflix adds more movies, and may need to buy more expensive servers or they may be left with too many extra storage space which they may not use. costing them money as well.

This led to a business opportunity for big companies with extra storage space on their servers. I'm sure somebody thought hmmm " what if we rent out these storage spaces to smaller companies, who have smaller storage needs and are not looking to buy their own servers, we can make a hell of money"

That's how the concept of cloud came up.

"clouding" is simply the storage of your data or movies on another persons server, which you can access over the internet. most of the time you pay them a sum of money, while they manage configurations and maintenance.

it is important to note that cloud is not limited to storage alone. although that is the most common use. the cloud has grown to accommodate things like compute, load balancers e.t.c

so in the simplest form, Cloud engineering primarily revolves around how servers are configured in the cloud. how you set up your servers and maintain them on another persons infrastructure . and this is made possible by the process of virtualization. cloud engineering includes adjacent careers like cloud security engineer, cloud network engineer and even cloud software developer

So now that we have a basic understanding cloud engineering. do you need to learn to code to become one?

I would say it depends. it depends on the role you are taking up in the cloud. first off coding is simply writing instructions for computers to follow. you don't need to overcomplicate things.

if you are looking to be a cloud native developer, you will definitely need to learn how to code. if you are looking at cloud security or cloud architecture, you will primarily write a different kind of code; popularly known as infrastructure as a code. this is where you write codes that declare and create infrastructure for you in the cloud. top of this language is terraform; ansible and others. you will also need to understand linux commands and scripting for the cloud.

However in my personal opinion it will be of great benefit to you, if you learn how to code at least on the level of understanding the code you are about to deploy as a cloud engineer.

In conclusion. You don't have to learn the regular programming, but to stand out, you need to learn how to program.