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30-day lab plan · ☁️ Cloud Engineer (AWS / Azure / GCP / OCI)

Become job-ready as acloud engineer in 30 days.

One focused task a day, four weeks, ending with a portfolio and a mock interview. Built for students and engineers in India who learn by doing — about 2 hours a day on weekdays, a little more on weekends.

What you needInterview questions →Role path →
Your kit

Set up before day 1

AWS and Azure free tiers (set budget alerts!), Terraform, and our cloud-vs-on-prem guide and Proxmox sizer. Everything here is free or has a free tier; a laptop with 16 GB RAM is enough for most labs (32 GB for nested clusters).

  • Daily ruleFinish the task, write 5 lines of notes, commit to Git. Notes become your interview stories.
  • Weekend ruleDay 7 of each week is a review: redo the hardest task from memory.
  • Stuck rule30 minutes max, then ask in a community or our engineer network.
Week 1

Core services

  1. Day 1Account setup, MFA, budget alerts, IAM user/roles
  2. Day 2VPC with public/private subnets, NAT, bastion
  3. Day 3EC2 + ALB + ASG serving a static app
  4. Day 4S3 static site + CloudFront; bucket policies
  5. Day 5RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ; connect privately
  6. Day 6CloudWatch metrics/alarms; logs agent
  7. Day 7Review: diagram and cost estimate of the week’s stack
Week 2

IaC & containers

  1. Day 8Terraform: recreate week 1 as code with remote state
  2. Day 9Modules and workspaces (dev/prod)
  3. Day 10ECR + ECS Fargate service for a container
  4. Day 11EKS cluster (small) with a deployment and ingress
  5. Day 12Secrets Manager + IAM role for the app
  6. Day 13CI pipeline (GitHub Actions) with OIDC to AWS
  7. Day 14Review: destroy everything; confirm $0 bill
Week 3

Azure & hybrid

  1. Day 15Azure VNet, VM, NSG, Bastion
  2. Day 16Azure App Service + Azure SQL
  3. Day 17Entra ID: users, groups, conditional access
  4. Day 18Site-to-site VPN between Azure and your home lab/Proxmox
  5. Day 19Azure Monitor + Log Analytics
  6. Day 20Compare an identical workload on AWS vs Azure vs private cloud (our sizer)
  7. Day 21Review: write the hybrid architecture doc
Week 4

Operations & portfolio

  1. Day 22Cost optimisation exercise on a sample bill; FinOps tagging
  2. Day 23Landing zone concepts: Control Tower/Management groups
  3. Day 24Security posture: Config/Defender findings and fixes
  4. Day 25DR: cross-region backup and restore drill
  5. Day 26Serverless API (Lambda/API Gateway) with observability
  6. Day 27Mock interview with our question bank
  7. Day 28Publish Terraform repo + diagrams; update resume; book AWS SAA
After day 30

What you will have

  • A portfolio repoDiagrams, configs, scripts and runbooks a hiring manager can read in five minutes.
  • Interview storiesReal faults you fixed — the answers to “tell me about a time…”.
  • A certification targetSee the role path for which exam to book next.
  • A place in our networkFinish the plan, share the repo, and apply — we mentor and place engineers who complete it.

Finished the plan? Show us.

Share your repo and notes; completed plans get a technical conversation with our architects and first paid tasks through the engineer network.

Apply to the networkPractice interview questions