From IT Support to Cloud Engineer in 12 Months

Support pros already excel at user empathy and ticket hygiene. Translate that into automation, IaC, and platform ownership with a year-long plan.

Quarter 1 – Build Cloud Fluency

• Complete the AWS Cloud Quest or Azure Fundamentals path. Screenshot every lab.
• Shadow your company’s infrastructure team for one ticket per week. Capture notes in a shared doc.
• Ship a portfolio-ready static site to S3 + CloudFront and add monitoring via CloudWatch.

Quarter 2 – Automate Everything

1. Earn AWS Solutions Architect Associate or AZ-104.
2. Learn Terraform basics and manage IAM roles-as-code.
3. Instrument your scripts with logging + metrics that you can show leadership.

Quarter 3 – Platform Mindset

• Volunteer for an internal migration or DR test; document your contributions.
• Spin up a home lab with Kubernetes (K3s) and GitHub Actions deploying containerized services.
• Pair up with a developer to solve a backlog item related to CI/CD or infrastructure.

Quarter 4 – Broadcast Your Value

• Publish two technical blog posts walking through your automation wins.
• Lead a lunch-and-learn on cost optimization or incident retrospectives.
• Interview with at least three companies to benchmark comp.

This loop compounds because each project feeds the next certification and narrative. By the time you reach month twelve you own repeatable stories about scaling operational excellence—exactly what cloud hiring managers crave.