📄 Files, Text & Editing
Creating, reading, moving, editing files — plus the text editors you'll need. Cloud engineers live in config files. Know vim basics even if you hate it — EC2 instances often have nothing else.
🔒 Permissions & Ownership
One of the most common interview topics. Permissions are how Linux security works — misunderstand this and you'll be debugging "permission denied" errors for hours. Closely maps to IAM thinking in AWS.
⚙️ Processes & Jobs
You'll need this for debugging hung services, understanding resource usage on EC2, and managing background jobs. Also critical for writing startup scripts and systemd services.
🌐 Networking Commands
As a cloud engineer this is your daily toolkit — checking connectivity, ports, DNS, routing. Many of these overlap directly with troubleshooting VPCs, Security Groups, and load balancers.
🖥️ System Info & Disk
Understanding the machine you're on: disk space, memory, CPU, users, logs. Essential for capacity planning, cost optimisation on EC2, and incident response.
🔧 Pipes, Grep, Redirection & Scripting
This is what separates someone who "uses Linux" from someone who's productive on Linux. Combining commands with pipes is where the real power is — critical for log analysis, automation, and shell scripts in CI/CD.
📋 Quick Reference Cheatsheet
Print this. Stick it somewhere. Every command in compact form grouped by category — your desk reference for the first few months.
🎯 Interview Questions — Junior → Mid
Real questions asked at cloud/DevOps interviews. Click each to reveal a complete answer. Green = Junior level. Orange = Mid level. Study the mid-level ones — they're what separates you from other candidates.
🧠 Knowledge Check
Test yourself. These questions are drawn directly from real interview scenarios. Don't skip this — retrieval practice is the fastest way to lock in knowledge.