I work as a data center network engineer for a multinational company. The executive leadership at my company has drank the cloud cool-aid and has seen fit to dramatically scale back many of our on-prem data center/colo locations around the globe to simple POPs and move a majority of the company infrastructure into google cloud.
At the moment, some aspects of our infrastructure and services can't be moved into the cloud, leaving us with a large traditional data center and a hybrid cloud solution. I can see the writing on the wall, and as much as executive leadership is trying to prevent a panic among the engineering teams that support traditional data center/colo locations, I know they're working as hard as possible to find a way to move the remaining bits of our infrastructure to the cloud.
When that happens, my team will have no more data centers to administer. Other SRE and platform teams are very politically powerful within my org and have been trying to snipe things from our control. There's a campus networking team and it looks like business is considering moving all networking responsibilities to them after they close all our data centers and let my team go.
I'm not sitting idle waiting for a pink slip. I've taken steps to make sure I'm in a good place should I be "made redundant". I've got a multi-month emergency fund saved up, I've brushed up my resume, and I went out and got my CCNP. I've also been learning python, ansible, and kubernetes while using those daily at work and keeping a portfolio of automation projects I've completed.
I'm not a fan of "the cloud" (other people's computers) and I think firing all on-prem infra engineers (along with their institutional knowledge) and outsourcing your company's infrastructure to another company is a disastrous idea, but I'm not in a position to argue this with the people making the decisions. It's a large company and I'm just a low level engineer within one of many infra teams. The people making the decisions are multi-millionaires and billionaires.
Nonetheless, I want to adapt, survive, and thrive so I'm looking at how I can transition into a "cloud network engineer" role. I'm not desperate to stay with my current company, but if I did have some cloud networking certs when the axe falls, I could argue that keeping me on would be worth it. If anything, it'd buy me more time to look around and open more doors for me elsewhere.
The problem I'm running into is that it seems that resources on cloud networking are fairly sparse compared to when I was studying for the CCNP. This is understandable since "cloud" is still relatively new. I'm trying to take advantage of the opportunity I have at my company to interact with a large scale gcp operation and learn as much as I can about that. I've been eyeing google's "Professional Cloud Network Engineer" cert and enrolled in their courses on coursera since that's the most immediately relevant to my day job. I'm also wondering if it might be worth it to look into AWS or Azure certs, though I don't have any direct on the job experience with those.
Most of the stuff that comes up when I search for resources and trainings on cloud networking is just bullshit marketing presentations or information more geared towards people developing apps in the cloud, not really infrastructure people.
Has anyone here made the jump into a more cloud networking focused role? What resources did you use? Any books you can recommend? Courses? Videos?
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