Insight of my track to become a Cloud DevOps Engineer

From November 2019 I have gotten the chance to participate in the Bertelsmann Technology Scholarship (Cloud Track) of Udacity. It is an E-Learning challenge with mentoring and a very strong, active community from all over the world.
After finishing the lessons, I have reflected how I developed myself in these weeks of daily studying and practicing my new skills. Even though I need more cloud - projects to actually feel confident with AWS (Amazon Web Services), these lessons and exercises brought me forward in my path of becoming a full stack developer for web applications.

Today I want to share with you my favorite and second favorite lessons of the challenge. Why are these lessons so interesting to me? As a tutor myself, I am always interested in new methods, hands on learning and innovation of teaching. These attributes were very present and made these lessons a best practice example and in multiple dimensions valuable for me:

My favorite lesson is about Infrastructure Diagrams. The goal of the lesson is to get the student used to type of diagrams which will be required to create and review while performing the work as a Cloud DevOps Engineer. For me this is like reading flowcharts, pseudo code or electrical plans in the jobs I have done: Clear, rational and with almost no freedom of interpretation. This way of communication is what you want to reach in collaboration and projects.
In the lesson, we drew a real world example of a so called „extension of the on-premises network“, guided step by step but also somehow on our own. The network we have drafted contains private subnets, but did not have NAT Gateways. Somehow we have used a mind mapping model to learn the concept of the infrastructure. The other favorite lesson contained Networking Infrastructure, in which we have actually built the example in an AWS - Cloud. This lesson was mostly building after what we have planned in our concept, but contained a lot of interesting information as well. And the best: You can see that your new infrastructure actually works. After that I wanted to build on top of these new skills and tested further ideas and structure.

All in all, I am super happy to be part of this scholarship and be involved in a challenge to improve the skills needed in the market right now. For all my project and personal development, this studying helps me a lot!