r/cloudengineering • u/Ill_Spirit3152 • 4d ago
Cloud Engineering vs Cloud Security Engineering — Which One Should I Choose?
I’m deciding between two career paths: Cloud Engineering and Cloud Security Engineering.
I don’t like heavy coding, and I’m not a big fan of very difficult work. I’m more interested in working with systems, infrastructure, networking, and understanding how things work.
Which path would you recommend for someone like me? Which one has less coding, is easier to get into as a beginner, and has better long-term career opportunities?
I’d really appreciate advice from people who work in these fields.
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u/Agreeable_Mud_5816 4d ago
Are you passiaonre about it
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u/Ill_Spirit3152 4d ago
Yes, definitely. I’m interested in computers and PC gaming, and I want to build my career around something related to computers.
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u/Naetharu 4d ago
I’m deciding between two career paths: Cloud Engineering and Cloud Security Engineering.
I don’t like heavy coding, and I’m not a big fan of very difficult work.
These are not jobs for you my friend.
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u/TerraformAndChill 4d ago
I got 6 Juniors on a special project I took, and made them into Cloud Engineers. They had no previous cloud experience but they did have some IT experience. It took them on average, a year to be able to fully provide service to the customers, and with AI, they now don't really need me. See, It's not about the experience, today, it's about "are you capable to stir up confidence in you clients" so they can trust you to keep their infra/business running. I would go Cloud Engineering even though it's harder, because you can always ask Ai for the vulnerabilities and it will help you, but being One stop shop, hand on, for all cloud needs, is the single most important thing you can do, and in 5-10 years time, only these individuals will survive the interrupt Ai is doing to the market. Godspeed and prosper.
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u/Tokyobuilder 4d ago
But Ai can help and do work for the cloud engineers as well isn't it? Also wanna know what kind of projects you work on?
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u/Otherwise-Key806 4d ago
Yes, Ai has been a major accelerator in cloud work. I have barely written any code (mainly terraform in aws) for about a year. It helps me architect, develop, deploy and troubleshoot in the cloud, and I can do work about 5-10 times faster. I mainly do landing zones, big migrations and cloud based solutions for enterprise organizations.
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u/Ill_Spirit3152 3d ago
Thank you so much. I really appreciate your advice and respect your opinion. Thank you again for sharing your thoughts and advice with me.
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u/Traditional-Cell3566 4d ago
Cloud engineer will need to know infrastructure as a code (IaC). Cloud security engineer will most likely need to know bash and be comfortable with CLI.
Even at the sysadmin level you will need to know powershell and scripting.
System engineering can be hard as hell depending on a company.
Not going to lie, in a current IT job market, you will have hard time climbing the corporate ladder if you are not willing to take on hard work lol
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u/Evaderofdoom 4d ago
Neither will be your first job in IT. You will likely start in help desk and have years to figure it out
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u/Asvp_bmoo 4d ago
Just hold off on engineer roles in any domain. Developing plugins with an agent would be a good start for you. Maybe something like Excalidraw
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u/Funshuay 3d ago
"not a big fan of difficult work"... I'm a senior cloud security engineer and no matter what level you want to work with, if you can't do the difficult work you will be out of a job. The "easy" stuff is now covered with AI in my company so mainly the human centric difficult security and architectural stuff left
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u/CloudLessons 4h ago
Cloud Engineering is a better option if you want to focus more on ops/systems work.
However most roles, especially the higher paying ones, will want someone that is comfortable with at least light to moderate programming (1-2 hours a week).
The most cloud-adjacent role that probably requires the least amount of coding knowledge would be Data Center Technician, but you would make about 2 to 3 times LESS than what a Cloud Engineer would.
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u/Oleksii_Bebych 4d ago
Cloud engineering would fit better for beginner. Security requires some experience. But in both cases you will need coding to grow in you position. Clickops is only for junior engineers
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u/Ill_Spirit3152 4d ago
Thank you for your answer. If I know around 5–10% of Python at the beginning and I’m a complete beginner, would that be enough to start learning Cloud Engineering and eventually apply for jobs? Thanks in advance for your answer!
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u/eman0821 4d ago
If you don't like coding well good luck. Learn to do your own research as these aren't entry-level. Both require some level of programming especially Cloud Engineering. Everything in Cloud Engineering is done through IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and CI/CD pipelines, no manual mouse clicking through a web ui. Automation is basically the whole job. Python is used a lot in both Security and Cloud. You will be spending a lot of time working with cross functional teams especially Software Engineers. The job difficulty is high because these are high stakes jobs. Cloud Engineers are expected to be on-call when something breaks after hours.