AKS
AK Steel Holding Corp.
stock NYSE

tl:dr https://roadmap.sh/
A SWE background should be a short trip to Cloud Engineer. Several of my team members are exSWE's. One of the hardest parts about cloud is understanding resources usually have dependancies on other resources. I've found that this isn't a difficult concept for SWEs/Developers to grasp.
I would watch a short video on Terraform. IDK that it is complicated enough for a cert, but get a grasp of state and modules. Then I would learn DevOps practices, especially pipelines. At that point, you need to be deploying cloud resources.
Fastest way to learn cloud is to get an Azure Free Account with the $200 credit, then pick a resource you want to learn and deploy a lot of it. I'd say it takes 2-3 deployments to have an idea of the requirements of a resource, if asked, but after about 10-15 deployments, you can name off the requirements pretty easily.
Subscription, Resource Group, and VNETs are basically free. Deploy a bunch then peer them to see how that works. Then get that stuff into TF. IAM is also free to learn so learn some best practices and make sure you follow them. IAM wont get you a job, but it will lose you one. I would focus on learning it quickly.
VMs are great to learn with but they can be expensive so I recomend Storage Accounts and Key Vaults to start with. They are cheap to provision/deprovision. They have a lot of settings that can be configured and almost every app will need one of each. You can basically learn IAM with storage accounts alone.
As a final test, I would make a project out of finding a random modern AKS cluster app architecture then try to deploy it all with code. Basically set up the bones with the free stuff. Then add the storage accounts and keyvaults. Then do your best to write up the code for the rest of the resources. Cool part of using terraform is that you can use it to build stuff then destroy stuff quickly, keeping costs down.
This is obviously the path for Azure but AWS and GCP are the same resources with different names. Once you learn one, its easy to learn the rest. Azure happens to be the easiest to navigate, for a beginner, and has the most options for configuration.
Last but not least, use AI. 75% of my deployments are massive AI architectures by teams being paid a lot to replace all IT work. Your ability to pivot in IT is about to be the most critical skill a person can have and AI can help a skilled engineer pivot anywhere.

tl:dr https://roadmap.sh/
A SWE background should be a short trip to Cloud Engineer. Several of my team members are exSWE's. One of the hardest parts about cloud is understanding resources usually have dependancies on other resources. I've found that this isn't a difficult concept for SWEs/Developers to grasp.
I would watch a short video on Terraform. IDK that it is complicated enough for a cert, but get a grasp of state and modules. Then I would learn DevOps practices, especially pipelines. At that point, you need to be deploying cloud resources.
Fastest way to learn cloud is to get an Azure Free Account with the $200 credit, then pick a resource you want to learn and deploy a lot of it. I'd say it takes 2-3 deployments to have an idea of the requirements of a resource, if asked, but after about 10-15 deployments, you can name off the requirements pretty easily.
Subscription, Resource Group, and VNETs are basically free. Deploy a bunch then peer them to see how that works. Then get that stuff into TF. IAM is also free to learn so learn some best practices and make sure you follow them. IAM wont get you a job, but it will lose you one. I would focus on learning it quickly.
VMs are great to learn with but they can be expensive so I recomend Storage Accounts and Key Vaults to start with. They are cheap to provision/deprovision. They have a lot of settings that can be configured and almost every app will need one of each. You can basically learn IAM with storage accounts alone.
As a final test, I would make a project out of finding a random modern AKS cluster app architecture then try to deploy it all with code. Basically set up the bones with the free stuff. Then add the storage accounts and keyvaults. Then do your best to write up the code for the rest of the resources. Cool part of using terraform is that you can use it to build stuff then destroy stuff quickly, keeping costs down.
This is obviously the path for Azure but AWS and GCP are the same resources with different names. Once you learn one, its easy to learn the rest. Azure happens to be the easiest to navigate, for a beginner, and has the most options for configuration.
Last but not least, use AI. 75% of my deployments are massive AI architectures by teams being paid a lot to replace all IT work. Your ability to pivot in IT is about to be the most critical skill a person can have and AI can help a skilled engineer pivot anywhere.