Cloud Computing Skills Every Forward Deployed Engineer Needs

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Cloud Computing Skills Every Forward Deployed Engineer Needs

Cloud computing is one of the most important aspects of modern software development. In today’s world, companies leverage the power of the cloud to host applications and data, store and analyze information, and provide services to customers. A Forward Deployed Engineer must understand the key concepts related to cloud technologies and services in order to design and develop modern applications and software that can effectively solve business problems.

A person who takes on the role of an FDE is responsible not only for developing programs but also for understanding the business and its needs, designing integrated systems and processes, implementing and maintaining software and systems, and finding solutions to technical challenges. Cloud service providers offer products and solutions that enable engineers to build and deploy integrated applications and systems.

Cloud computing skills for Forward Deployed Engineers covering AWS, Docker, cloud deployment, networking, security, and monitoring.

1. Knowing the Basic Principles of Cloud Computing

Before you start using the cloud, you need to understand the basic principles of cloud computing.

By using the cloud, companies can meet their needs in terms of servers, storage, databases, and networks through the internet instead of having these services locally.

  • An FDE needs to know all the concepts related to the cloud, including:
  • IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service: virtual machines, storage, and networking,
  • PaaS – Platform as a Service: a managed platform to develop and launch apps,
  • SaaS – Software as a Service: apps available online,
  • public, private, and hybrid clouds: the way that organizations can use the cloud,
  • scalability and elasticity: the ability to allocate resources based on a particular app’s needs,
  • high availability: the ability to make sure that an app continues working despite hardware or software failures.

2. Virtual Machines and Cloud Infrastructure

Virtual machines represent an essential concept that enables developers to build applications on remote servers hosted in the cloud.

For FDEs, the knowledge of virtual machines is beneficial in terms of deploying backend applications, configuring development environments, and troubleshooting servers.

The key topics related to the subject are as follows:

  • The creation of virtual machines and their basic configuration;
  • The establishment of a remote connection to Linux-based servers via SSH;
  • The setup of Python programming language and dependencies;
  • The configuration of firewalls and security groups;
  • The management of CPU, memory, and disk;
  • The analysis of logs and troubleshooting techniques.

An FDE professional can utilize the skillset related to virtual machines in the real-life scenario when a company needs to host a Python-based application that processes financial transactions. In such a case, the developer would be able to deploy the software in the cloud or on a remote server and configure the environment to ensure that the application runs smoothly and is accessible from the internet. However, it is noteworthy that the usage of virtual machines is not the only way of hosting applications as managed platforms and containers can provide the necessary isolation and simplify the maintenance in some cases.

3.Cloud Storage and Database Services

Modern applications produce and process significant amounts of data. Cloud storage and databases are essential for storing and retrieving this information.

An FDE must be able to differentiate between the storage of objects, files, blocks, and databases.

The most widely used cloud storage and database services include:

Amazon S3 for object storage,

Azure Blob Storage for storing unstructured data,

Google Cloud Storage for cloud object storage,

Amazon RDS for relational databases,

Azure SQL Database for relational databases,

and cloud NoSQL databases.

Consider a document processing application that receives invoices from customers. The application can store the uploaded files in the cloud’s object storage, extract the relevant information using Python, and store it in a database.

This architecture stores files separately from the business data, making it more organized and easier to maintain.

4.Cloud Networking and API Connectivity

Cloud networking provides secure communication between applications, servers, databases, and third-party services.

As a network engineer, I often encounter the need to discuss related technologies with systems deployed in different environments. Understanding concepts related to cloud networking fundamentals is critically important.

  • Among the topics worth of consideration are the following:
  • Virtual private cloud and virtual networks
  • Public and private subnets
  • IP addresses and DNS
  • Load balancers
  • Firewalls and security groups
  • HTTP and HTTPS
  • VPNs
  • API gateway

An illustration of the importance of networking falls when designing a customer relationship management application that needs to communicate with an external payment service. In this scenario, an FDE needs to know about API connectivity, authentication, access, and error handling to design the communication between the applications properly. After that, a properly designed network infrastructure can ensure the protection of business data and the ability of authorized applications to communicate.

5.Cloud Security and Identity Management

Security is one of the most important aspects of developing business applications in the cloud. FDEs should be aware of the required measures to protect applications, infrastructure, and data.

  • Among the main concepts related to cloud security, there are the following:
  • identity and access management (IAM),
  • role-based access,
  • multi-factor authentication,
  • secrets management,
  • encryption at rest and in transit,
  • secure API authentication,
  • network access limitation,
  • and security monitoring and auditing.

For example, developing a financial application that uses a cloud database to store information about customer transactions. The application will need to have sufficient access to the database to retrieve the required information, but its access should be limited to only the necessary data. Also, the credentials to the database should not be stored in the application’s source code but, instead, be encrypted somewhere in the cloud.

The concept of least privilege is also important to know and understand as it is used to allow only the necessary level of access to the application.

Conclusion

I think it is correct to say that cloud computing plays a significant role in developing and operating modern business software systems. Thus, the current interest in the FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) program is directly related to the necessity to understand the underlying principles of the cloud infrastructure and learn the specificities of its functioning.

First and foremost, the candidates should study the basics of cloud infrastructure, choose the preferred platform (for example, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services), and become familiar with the essential concepts.

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