I once did someone a favor and instead of saying thank you, they said “May Allah ease things for you as you have eased things for me.”That dua stayed with me, Words matter
When I started in IT, I thought the cloud was the future, and on-prem was dying.
Then I got into our data center.
Rows of racks humming. Cold aisle, hot aisle. UPS units the size of fridges. Cable trays running across the ceiling like veins and blinking lights, ev, blinking
My senior pointed at the racks and said, "This runs the entire business. Learn it."
That day changed how I saw infrastructure.
Years later, I can tell you on-prem isn't dying.
Most businesses in Africa still run on physical infrastructure. The cloud isn't replacing it. It's extending it.
The engineers who understand both who can work in a data center AND write a Terraform module are the ones companies are fighting to hire.
Don't skip the fundamentals chasing the cloud.
The cloud is just someone else's data center.
Learn the data center first.