Computing & Data
How to become a Cloud & DevOps Engineer
Also known as Site Reliability Engineer, Platform Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer. Everything below comes from the same database our assessment scores against.
The route in
1. Undergraduate
3 years- Qualifications:
- B.Tech Computer Science, BCA, B.Sc. Information Technology
- Entrance exams:
- JEE Main, State CET, University merit
- Typical cost:
- ₹1.2 lakh to ₹18 lakh
What does a Cloud & DevOps Engineer earn in India?
Entry level
₹4 lakh – ₹12 lakh
per year
Mid career
₹15 lakh – ₹45 lakh
per year
Indicative. These bands are an editorial estimate assembled from public reporting, and have not yet been reconciled against a named dataset. Treat them as a shape, not a promise — the same title pays very differently across a service company, a product company and a start-up.
Outlook
Hiring demand
High growth — one of the faster-expanding areas in the country.
Exposure to automation
Medium. Parts of this role are already being automated, and the work is shifting toward the pieces that are not. Expect the job to change rather than disappear.
What does a Cloud & DevOps Engineer do?
What this actually looks like
A day as a Cloud & DevOps Engineer
Written about this role. The references behind it cover computing & data as a field rather than cloud & devops engineer specifically.
What you would actually be doing
- Automating a deployment so nobody has to remember the steps
- Reading logs and metrics to find out why last night's alert fired
- Reducing a cloud bill somebody in finance has started asking about
- Building the pipeline that tests and ships other people's code
- Being on call, and answering the page at three in the morning
Who you work with
- Developers who want to ship now and treat you as the gate
- Security and compliance teams, over access and audit trails
- Cloud vendors and their support queues
- Whoever is awake during an incident, in whatever time zone
What you work with
- AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, in depth on one of them
- Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker and the CI system
- Monitoring and alerting stacks
- Shell and Python for the glue nobody else writes
Where and when: One of the more remote-friendly roles in computing. Ordinary weeks are calm automation work. On-call weeks are not, and the interruption can come at any hour. Incidents are rare, absorbing and public inside the company.
Working conditions
- Typical hours
- On-call rotation
- Remote possible
- Yes, at least partly
- Travel
- low travel
- Physical demand
- low physical demand
Reality check
Before you choose cloud & devops engineer
A report that only lists what is appealing about a career is an advertisement. This is the other half. Written about this role. The references behind it cover computing & data as a field rather than cloud & devops engineer specifically.
What people like about it
- The route in does not require a top-tier degree, only demonstrable skill
- Certifications are cheap, quick and genuinely respected by employers
- Work is remote-friendly, including for employers abroad
- When the automation works, thousands of deployments happen without you
What is genuinely hard
- On-call means the job can reach you at any hour of the night
- An outage is visible to the whole company and sometimes to customers
- The tooling changes constantly, so learning never settles
- You are noticed mainly when something breaks
- Who tends to enjoy this work
- Would rather automate a task than repeat it, stay methodical while something is on fire, and are comfortable being responsible for what other people shipped.
- What the education journey is really like
- A B.Tech, BCA or B.Sc. in computing is the usual start, and polytechnic diploma holders reach this work too. This is one of the few computing fields where vendor certifications carry real weight — AWS, Azure, Kubernetes. Most people arrive sideways, from support, networks or development, after a year or two of learning the automation on the job.
Other legitimate ways in
The first route does not always work, and it is not always the best one. These are real alternatives, not consolation prizes.
Up from support
- Any degree or diploma, then an IT support or NOC role
- Certifications alongside the job — cloud, Linux, Kubernetes
- Cloud or platform engineer
The most common route and one of the few genuine ladders left in computing. Support teaches you how systems break, which is the part that cannot be taught from a course.
From networks
- Diploma or degree, then network administration
- Cloud networking and security certifications
- Platform or infrastructure engineering
Network people already understand what most developers never learn. The move is mainly about adding automation and code to what you can already reason about.
From development
- Any computing degree, then a software engineering role
- Take on the build, deploy and reliability work nobody wants
- Site reliability or platform engineering
Common in product companies, where the split between building and running software has largely disappeared.
Who may not enjoy being a Cloud & DevOps Engineer?
Nothing here is a judgement about you — it is what the job is like, listed so you can decide whether it is what you want.
- The hours look like this: on-call rotation.
The four hardest things about the work itself are listed above, under what is genuinely hard. If those and the points here describe things you would rather not sign up for, that is a real answer and worth having before a stream or a degree is chosen around it.
What skills does a Cloud & DevOps Engineer need?
What the job actually asks for, split four ways. The assessment tells you which of these your own scores already speak to.
Technical skills
- Linux, networking and how a request actually reaches a server
- Infrastructure as code, so an environment can be rebuilt from scratch
- Debugging a live system from its logs and metrics
- Capacity and cost modelling for cloud spend
People skills
- Staying methodical during an incident
- Writing a post-incident review that blames the system, not a person
- Saying no to a risky release, with the reason
- Handing over cleanly at the end of an on-call shift
Digital and AI skills
- One cloud platform in depth — AWS, Azure or Google Cloud
- Kubernetes and containers
- CI and CD pipelines
- Scripting in shell and Python
Industry knowledge
- What your organisation's uptime commitment actually promises
- Data residency and access rules that apply to your sector
- Where the cloud bill goes, service by service
If Cloud & DevOps Engineer appeals, also look at
Chosen by how far the interest pattern and the weighted activities of each one overlap with this. The reason is printed so you can disagree with it.
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People move between these two often. Experience in one counts toward the other. Both use computing & systems.
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People move between these two often. Experience in one counts toward the other. Both use computing & systems.
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Uses the same computing & systems and process & coordination skills. You get in a different way.
Computing & Data
People move between these two often. Experience in one counts toward the other. Both use computing & systems.
Streams this is reachable from
Exams worth knowing about
Where an exam has its own page, it lists every other career it opens — useful if this one turns out not to fit.
Where this qualification also leads
The degrees on this route open other doors too. Worth knowing before you commit to one destination.
Who tends to be happy here
People who rate these highly tend to stay in this work. If none of them sound like you, that is worth taking seriously.
- Achievement
- Working conditions
Are you sure Cloud & DevOps Engineer is the career you want?
Everything above describes the job. None of it tells you whether it fits you. So it is worth asking plainly, before a stream or a degree gets chosen around it.
- Not sure? Then this is exactly the question the assessment exists to answer. It compares you against Cloud & DevOps Engineer and 196 other careers, and shows the arithmetic behind every score, so you can see why rather than being handed a verdict.
- Quite sure? Then double-check anyway. Being certain is not the same as having checked, and the cost of finding out late is counted in years rather than in the 45 minutes this takes. If it confirms what you already think, you carry on with a reason instead of a hope — plus the education route, the entrance exams and a ninety-day plan.
And if it does not line up, nothing closes. Cloud & DevOps Engineer stays on your list with the gap named and a route attached, next to the careers your profile already reaches — so the answer is something to act on either way.
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Last verified 2026-08-01. This is a career-guidance instrument. It is not a clinical or diagnostic tool. It does not measure intelligence, IQ, or a person’s worth. Its results are one input among several, and are intended to be interpreted with a trained counsellor.