Ask HN: How to learn cloud tools coming from old GUI-based web management?

3 points by ccajas 5 years ago | 2 comments

I have no experience with modern cloud services, professional or otherwise. I come from simple webdev for small scale apps work, involving small business clients. My experience managing things on remote servers involves, third party hosting companies that handle the infrastructure so we don't have to worry about data center uptime. Control panel GUIs like cPanel, Plesk are commonplace, to manage DNS and set up cron jobs, alongside GUIs for relational databases like PHP MyAdmin, and the occasional SSH into the server.

What is the best analogue to cloud services to Azure, AWS and GCP? I want to get skilled in at least one of them, explained in terms that can make sense for someone who has only used these older hosting tools. Perhaps to demonstrate a one-to-one analogue to the concepts found in cloud storage and computing for making the transition from this older form of website management.

hacklivelove 5 years ago |

Yesterday I came across the article with review of Jelastic cloud. The author explains this service in the following way: "It’s kind of like WHM/cPanel but hosted on a cloud and can also manage server clusters rather than just one server, and integrate many other cloud services (storage, CDN, DNS, etc)" https://wpjohnny.com/jelastic-cloud-platform-review

Seems as a good suit for you to start with. They have control panel and automation of some infrastructure management processes, so you can get started even without profound technical cloud expertise and dive deeper eventually.

myu701 5 years ago |

I saw this post, I'm not qualified to try to answer it, but I will say this.

If you learn how to wrap a web site/app in a docker container, and connect that site to an external database / fileshare, you have the core kernel needed to have easy access to the cloud services.

The cloud services offer various vendor-specific features. But unless you want to become an AWS engineer, etc., you will want to use each cloud platform's flavor of virtual machines.

Azure and AWS are fine to learn. I'm nervous that GCP will either be killed as a product, or your google account will be smoked by some AI, and either way, you won't be able to recover that investment in a google-controlled product.

I had someone who was an old Perl cowboy teach me Azure, but I'm certain that Udemy has a course that will work for teaching Azure or AWS.

Hope this helps.