While not a fan of most certs, I would highly recommend the RHCSA to get an understanding of common sysadmin tasks as it is a hands-on exam and fairly relevant

While not a fan of most certs, I would highly recommend the RHCSA to get an understanding of common sysadmin tasks as it is a hands-on exam and fairly relevant to the real world, and RHCE as well. In addition you should find some random service in your language of choice on GitHub that requires a database and try to implement in a cloud provider taking into account high availability, deployment types (Blue/Green vs Rolling, for example), durability, backups, security, logging, and monitoring by rolling out the services yourself or through managed services at a given cloud provider using a CM like Ansible and/or Terraform.