The journey

My journey into this space began a very long time ago so I’ll skip all the gory details and jump into how I managed to get to this point. The gist of it is I was a “sysadmin” running IT for what was at the time a very large systems integrator. We had ~200 or so people and processed roughly 300 orders per day. It was a “paperless” warehouse running on OS/2. Told you it was “long ago”. Let’s fast forward…

Started working for a company who was starting their transformation journey (this is well before Covid) and had been using large numbers of virtual machines. I was brought in because they had an outage due to a hardware failure and new management decided it was best to take advantage of AWS. The current AWS infrastructure was created by the old school datacenter admins so it, too was a catastrophe waiting to happen.

I had been working with AWS for a while so I had been taking my knowledge of puppet and applying it to help automate some of the mundane tasks. The old school devs were used to using mercurial so I encouraged them to pull some of the tasks created in puppet into their code and got them started deploying their apps on their own to AWS. This was working.

Fast forward a bit and the dev teams had evolved to a really nice Agile based setup. I had spent a ton of time learning how to manage pipelines, transitioning from puppet to terraform, and had educated a lot of the newer operations folks on automating everything.

My journey is probably very similar to most. In my case I never really got into windows. I had started down the linux path very early in the big scheme of things and stuck with it. This really helped when it came to running and managing things in the cloud. Transitioning all of the various scripting languages was pretty straightforward because I had a good grasp on how to script. I had bash scripts for everything and that helped tremendously when I dove into Terraform and other tools. Plus I was very comfortable with the command line.

The one thing I suggest is read, read, read. O’Reilly is a great resource. No matter where you are coming from the most important thing to remember is look at the box and think INSIDE of it. Never try to apply knowledge from what you are currently doing into what you want to do. What I mean by this is managing VMs is very different from managing container images, but they are the same. Yea…I know confusing, but so is “cloud-native”.

I did it. You can, too.