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/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.

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u/WhiteBlaze87921 4d ago

Bro iac is scripting basically.... Not coding automation is in python

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u/eman0821 3d ago

You mean declarative? You need to know programming concepts to understand the what you are writing. Python is also for writing custom modules, shell scripts and some times CI/CD pipelines if using Jenkins. GoLang is also heavily used in Cloud Engineering for building custom modules/providers, RESTFUL APIs which is a full blown object oriented programming language. It's a lot programming in this role beyond scripting. You have to maintain CI/CD pipelines for deployments.

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u/xeroxedforsomereason 3d ago

this is stolen valor.

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u/WhiteBlaze87921 2d ago

Yeah but in that case each of them have different tasks not directly connected to what cloud does

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u/eman0821 2d ago

I'm a Cloud Engineer as that's what I do. This role is very heavy in coding. You can write CI/CD pipelines in Groovy, Bash, Python, YAML. You have to build custom modules in Golang and Python for certain requirements in a cloud environment and to expand the capabilities of Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, Cloudflare... Cloud Engineer writes custom restful APIs quite often.