5 years SWE trying to pivot to Cloud/DevOps realistic or delusional?
Hello, looking for a reality check from people in the industry.
I've been a full-stack dev for 5 years, I currently working in marketing and I run a side project where I do end to end delivery of projects, some infra stuff mainly using Hetzner with some AWS bits (SES & S3) as well as setting up GitOps, Terraform, Ansible (need to learn more here), email servers and GitHub Actions.
I have just started studying for AWS SAA-C03 (using Stephane Maarek course), I have worked with Linux systems most of my life, most of the debugging I do requires Googling and I'm trying to build some portfolio projects on the side that use AWS to showcase and talk about, although I've never done a Cloud Engineer interview before so I'm not sure what they entail.
What I'm trying to figure out:
- Is 3 months a realistic timeline to be interview-ready for these roles coming from a SWE background, or am I underestimating this? I am a mid level and aiming to jump into a mid level cloud engineer role as Junior ones don't seem to exist in the UK.
- For people who made a similar switch or know someone that has was a cert + 1-2 solid projects actually enough to get past the resume screen, or did you need more (K8s depth, more cloud-native breadth, prior ops experience even informally)?
- Anything you wish you'd prioritised differently in your first 3 months of prep?
Any and all advice is appreciated, thank you!