Learn cloud computing on AWS to deploy and run your own thing in eight weeks
Eight weeks of steady study — about 45 minutes a day on AWS's own free training, one cheap deep-dive course, and a real project on the free tier — takes you from "the cloud is someone else's computer" to actually running something you built on AWS and understanding what it costs. Roughly 40 hours total. "Cloud" is enormous, so this path commits to one concrete ladder: AWS, the market leader, because skills there transfer and the certification is recognised everywhere. You will not be a cloud architect. You will be able to deploy, run, and reason about a small system in the cloud — and be ready to sit the Cloud Practitioner exam if you want the credential.
8 weeks · ~40 hours · run your own project on AWS and be ready for the Cloud Practitioner exam
1.AWS Skill Builder — Cloud Practitioner foundations
Start free, from the source. AWS Skill Builder's Cloud Practitioner Essentials and the CLF-C02 exam-prep plan are built by AWS and kept current, covering the core vocabulary you cannot fake your way past: regions and availability zones, EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, the shared-responsibility model, and how billing actually works. Take notes by hand and resist the urge to binge the videos — the point is a correct mental model of the pieces, not a finished checklist. This is the free foundation everything else stands on.
Free; account sign-up required
AWS Skill Builder · Cloud Practitioner →2.Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, by Stéphane Maarek
Maarek's CLF-C02 course on Udemy is the consensus pick — around fifteen hours, taught by an eleven-time-certified instructor, with hands-on demos in every section that you run yourself on the free tier. It fills the gaps AWS's own material skips and drills you toward the exam. Watch at 1.25x, pause, and do every demo in your own console rather than just watching his. List price is roughly $90, but Udemy discounts it constantly to about $15–20 — wait for the sale, that is the real price. Pair it with his "6 Practice Exams" course before booking the test.
About $15–20 on sale (list ~$90)
Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner →3.Build something real on the AWS free tier
Knowledge that never touches the console evaporates. Build one real thing: host a static site on S3 behind CloudFront, or stand up a small app on a free-tier EC2 instance with a database, wire up an IAM role correctly, and watch your billing dashboard like a hawk. New accounts get a 12-month free tier plus 30-plus always-free services and sign-up credits, so this can cost nothing — but set a billing alarm on day one, because the expensive lesson everyone learns is a service left running. When your own thing is live and you understand its bill, the cloud has stopped being abstract. If you want the credential, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is about $100 USD.
Free tier (set a billing alarm); exam ~$100 USD if you choose to certify
AWS Free Tier →If this doesn't fit you
If your employer runs on Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, learn that instead — the concepts transfer but the buttons and exams do not, and you should train where you will actually work. For Azure, start with the free Microsoft Learn path for the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals certification; for Google Cloud, use Google Cloud Skills Boost toward the Cloud Digital Leader. Both are direct equivalents of the AWS path above.
Why this path
Most beginners drown trying to "learn the cloud" in the abstract, hopping between providers and tutorials and never building anything. The fix is to commit to one provider and one concrete outcome. AWS is the right default because it has the largest market share, so the skills and the certification carry the most weight, and its free training plus free tier mean you can go from zero to a running project without spending money. The sequence matters: the free foundations give you the vocabulary, Maarek's course gives you depth and exam-readiness cheaply, and the project forces it all to become real. Skipping step three is the classic failure — people pass the exam, then freeze the first time they face an empty console and a live bill.