[jamram82]

There are various flavors of cloud. For example Google cloud is mostly app or app based cloud, while AWS is bare metal cloud.

I would suggest following this blog - http://highscalability.com

which goes into real life architecture of various services and gives behind-the-scene look into cloud and non-cloud architecture, and why they chose to use certain tools or technologies.

Core concepts in domains like virtualization, networking, authentication, scalability are the same whether you do it in your own data center or cloud.

My advice is to strengthen yourself in core concepts.