It depends on the granularity you need. If you need to manage clusters and scaling and individual machines then you might need to spend some time going through

It depends on the granularity you need. If you need to manage clusters and scaling and individual machines then you might need to spend some time going through docs/books/tutorials for the cloud and tech in question. If you just want to host websites or simple services, IMO you are better off using one of the popular cloud wrappers such as heroku. They streamline the process a lot and has optional plug and play integrations to cloud hosted databases and queues and whatevers.