From Harmonica Teacher to Cloud Solutions Architect

Hi this is Ivan!

Thank you so much for joining the course.

I hope this course could provide the tips and useful resources to accelerate your #100DaysOfCloud journey.

This course is designed for you if you are planning for cloud career transition.

This course is also designed for you if you want to accelerate your cloud career development.

Before entering into the cloud industry, I have been making a living as a harmonica teacher for 10+ years.

I have huge enthusiasm teaching harmonica, as the instrument had largely enriched my 7-year secondary school life. It also brought me with lots of wonderful music-making moments and genuine friendships.

Being thankful trusted by many educational institutions, my mission in harmonica music education is to cultivate the spirit of "Passing the Torch" in different harmonica groups.

Time flies. There are too many beautiful things and amazing stories to share along my harmonica teaching career journey.

You can find an optional section at the bottom covering a brief summary and key milestones of my harmonica journey should you like to know more about this part of mine.

Long story short, because of COVID-19 since Jan 2020, my income from harmonica teaching dropped a lot (70-80% less). I had to plan ahead to support my living and my family.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 since Jan 2020, I have been actively searching for an alternative career path that could meet the following criteria:

After doing the research (glassdoor, levels.fyi, udacity), I found that the cloud industry and the role "cloud solutions architect" best fits the criteria above.

After doing the above research, with less teachings and more time due to COVID, I decided to give myself a serious try for cloud career transition starting from late May 2020 with strong determination. This decision turned out help me land my first cloud role as Cloud Engineer in Jan 2021.

Below is the summary of the key milestones of my cloud learning journey.

Although not all the conditions could be the same as of now, I hope it could provide you with the insights of how to make the best use of resources around you to plan for your cloud career transition / accelerate your cloud career development.

For details of my log of cloud certifications, you can refer to my GitHub repo and check the commit history.

Due to COVID, Udacity generously offered a free Nanodegree trial for one month at that time, which was a really big offer! I valued the hands-on implementation projects a lot as these projects could allow me to apply what I had learnt to practice.

In addition, these projects could be good and strong references for employers for someone like me with ZERO cloud working experience.

I picked the newly launched AWS Cloud Architect Nanodegree by then, with a plan to accomplish it in one month.

With lots of hard work and study, I managed to complete it within 1 month for FREE on 29 June 2020. Thanks Udacity!

I found that cloud learning buddies and support from learning community were very important to me by that time to keep up my learning motivation.

I spent 3-6 hours on cloud learning + exam preparation per day back then and sometimes I got really overwhelmed.

I am blessed to have joined the community and received the support by many of the cloud leaders and journeyers, in particular Andrew Brown, Jose Talancha and Johan Rin. Thank you!

1) Start Small; Break the bigger goal into smaller ones.

2) Persistence is the key; Work on it and appreciate yourself for the every little step you have moved forward.

3) A pass is a pass; Although training materials and practice tests help, and there are many amazing trainers offering great training courses, there is no need to over-subscribe / over-purchase / over-prepare; DON'T be a perfectionist!

I have used GitHub to record my cloud certification journey. Looking back, I found this decision really help me a lot in keeping my momentum.

Seeing the green squares on my "contributions" particularly help me to be persistent working towards my goal. This is one of the best tools that I recommend you to give a try to keep a good record of your cloud certification journeys as well as to present your cloud projects.

You can find the details of my 7 Rounds of #100DaysOfCloud in the next chapter!