Darryl R.

One good way to help with cloud costing is using spot instances of VMs. If you can handle work on your VMs being pre-empted by saving the in progress state then using spot instances is a real $$$ saver. Even if you can’t save the in progress state you will likely be ahead compared to full-priced VMs - especially for short running work as the chances of the spot instances being reclaims is usually pretty low.

The most important part of learning about cloud technology is doing practical, hands-on work. There is a wealth of knowledge about cloud technologies available from both paid and free resources. I highly recommend people check out training material on YouTube, all the free material from cloud providers like AWS and read places like X and LinkedIn where so many people publish articles. Sites like dev.to, medium.com hashnode.dev and others also offer tons of great material. Once you find relevant material for whatever topic you are interested in learning, the most important part by far is trying the techniques out yourself. Many articles contain the full source code and public cloud providers offer generous free tier usage.

When working on AWS I highly recommend you take a look using the AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) It can be associated with API Gateway, Application Load Balancers, Cloudfront Distributions, App Sync APIs and more. Even with the base rules you will catch many of the most common attacks from the internet. The WAF is also highly configurable with lots of options for catching specific attacks, blocking known malicious IPs, blocking VPN access, and much more. It isn’t free but for your production endpoints it is certainly worth it and really isn’t that expensive.

By far the most important way to truly understand cloud computing is by trying techniques out for yourself. Watching training videos or reading articles isn’t enough to take it in and retain for a long time. Many articles provide source code and complete steps to try for yourself. I recommend you always do this for the topics you are interested in. Take the original steps and code and then start modifying it to see what impact it has. If you do hands-on work yourself you will be much more likely to remember it and be able to use it in your job.

In a multi cloud environment you need to use tools and processes that are not specific to one cloud provider. A excellent example is with Infrastructure as Code tools. Using a cross vendor solution like Terraform can provide your organization with a consistent experience and process for setting up your infrastructure. If you're going to use vendor specific tools for this (I.e. Cloud Development Kit on AWS or similar cloud provider specific tools) then the processes will inevitably differ for each provider and the teams dealing with this will all have to be knowledgeable on different tools.

Cloud computing is an area that is constantly changing. New techologies, new pricing schemes, and new managed services introduced by cloud vendors can be game changers in developing the most resiliant and cost effective solution. These are the areas solution architects need to focus their learning on. The key things for cloud developers though is to try to take in as much knowledge as you can. There is an overabundance of free learning material on Youtube, tool websites, and from cloud providers themselves. The key for cloud developers to really learning is hands on experience. Take the material you read/watch about and try it in your account. You will retain it much better.