This is the first post in what I intend to become a series I am calling "Dev to Cloud" as to summarize my journey in my career so far. I have been working as a developer for about 5 years now doing a little bit of everything. I began early on working on building advanced analytics for machine optimization but I slowly gravitated to more backend development. I started working more on APIs and services interacting directly with the databases. Being at such a small company I slowly became very familiar with our backend and infrastructure. At a point I became the most qualified person to run the cloud and the reigns were handed over to me early 2019.
State of Affairs
Just to be clear. There was nothing really wrong with our cloud (other than unknown runaway costs and brutal manual labor overhead) at the time. Our security was sound, backups in place, and everything running generally smooth. The main thing was NO automation. Everything had been done manually. This meant hard to reproduce and maintain along with a bunch of other issues.
The Path Forward
This is where this blog comes in. I have been tasked with driving our cloud forward and I am just a software developer. A year ago I will admit I knew nothing about Terraform, or any Hashicorp product for that matter. I was barely passable with bash and easily lost within linux subsystems. I am far from an expert but I am striving to become one and its certainly quite the journey. All this blog is about is sharing what I have learned through my struggles and maybe helping someone else through the same.
We'll see how long I can keep this up 🙂