learntodriveai.dev/Cloud Engineering/Track setup
Cloud Engineering · Setup · ~5 min

Cloud Engineering track setup.

Complete the platform setup first if you haven’t already. You should have a terminal, Claude Code, Git, and a GitHub account ready.

§ Steps

1. Create your track folder

TERMINAL
mkdir -p ~/dev/cloud-engineering
cd ~/dev/cloud-engineering

About the cost

Real cloud engineering costs real money, and this is the only track on the platform that isn't free to run. The other six tracks are self-contained on your machine. Cloud engineering isn't — the pedagogy depends on you operating real infrastructure. Simulation tools don't cover it: LocalStack can't actually run the EC2 instance your Flask app needs in Project 1, and many of the services the later projects teach (Glue, CodePipeline, X-Ray, OpenSearch, Organizations, Athena) aren't available in free emulators at all. A free mode that makes the first verification impossible is worse than no free mode, so the track runs on real AWS from Project 1.

Expect to spend $5-15 across all 26 projects if you tear resources down at the end of each session, which is what the projects teach you to do. Leave a NAT Gateway or an RDS instance running between sessions and you'll see $30+ quickly. Ignore your own budget alarm and the cost is uncapped — AWS will bill whatever you provision.

Project 1's first deliverable is an AWS Budget alarm you provision yourself. Every later project ends with a teardown step and a tag-based scan for resources you might have forgotten. This isn't a safety rail the platform adds around you. Cost discipline is part of the job — every working cloud engineer sets up billing alarms and watches orphaned resources, because nobody else will. You're being taught the same habit on the same day you first touch infrastructure.

If paying real money to learn is a blocker, the other six tracks (web-dev, data-science, ml, data-engineering, analytics, cybersecurity) are free and full-length.

2. AWS account

You need an AWS account. If you don't have one, go to aws.amazon.com and create one. You'll need a credit card — AWS charges for the resources you create. Most of what you build in early projects is free-tier eligible, but the free tier has limits and conditions. You'll learn what those are in the projects.

Once your account is ready, create an IAM user for CLI access:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Console at console.aws.amazon.com
  2. Search for "IAM" in the top search bar
  3. Click Users in the left sidebar, then Create user
  4. Name it something like cloud-eng-student
  5. Attach the AdministratorAccess policy (for learning — you'll scope this down in later projects)
  6. Create an access key: select Command Line Interface (CLI) as the use case
  7. Save the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key — you'll need them in the next step

3. Cloud engineering tools: let Claude Code do it

Open Claude Code in your track folder:

TERMINAL
claude
PROMPT
I'm setting up a cloud engineering environment. Please:

1. Install Terraform (latest stable via HashiCorp's official APT/YUM repository)
2. Install the AWS CLI v2 (latest official installer)
3. Configure AWS credentials — run aws configure and set the region to us-east-1. I'll enter my access key and secret key when prompted.
4. Check if Docker is installed. If not, tell me how to install it (it needs admin access)

After each step, verify it worked and show me the result.

Note on Docker: Docker typically needs administrator access. If Claude Code can't install it directly, it will tell you what command to run yourself.

Verify

Once Claude Code finishes:

TERMINAL
terraform --version
aws --version
aws sts get-caller-identity
docker --version

You should see version numbers for the first three tools, and the aws sts command should show your AWS account ID. If it shows an error, your credentials aren't configured correctly — re-run aws configure.

4. Your first look

Everything is installed. Before you start Project 1, see what Claude Code can do when you point it at a cloud engineering problem.

PROMPT
Create a Terraform configuration for a simple web hosting setup: a VPC with one public 
subnet, an S3 bucket for static assets, and a security group that allows HTTP traffic. 
Use the AWS provider. Then run terraform init and terraform plan to show me what would 
be created. Do NOT run terraform apply — just show the plan.

As you work through the track, you'll learn why a single prompt isn't enough: why that security group might allow traffic from the entire internet, why the S3 bucket has no access policy, why the plan doesn't show what it'll cost, and why the state file matters — infrastructure changes are irreversible in ways code changes are not.

But for now, look at what just happened. That's the starting point.

←IntroductionStart Project 1→