The job
Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, SRE, Platform Engineer, Solutions Architect: what each title really means, and how to read an advert.
3 of 3 written
Cloud, DevOps and AWS, from zero
What the job actually is, and every tool underneath it run for real, not just described.
Where this stands
47 of 47 lessons written. The bar on every card below is counted from the lesson files that exist, not from a number I typed. A lesson that is planned and unwritten says so on its own page too.
- 132 shell panels, every one executed for real by bash, aws, docker, kubectl or terraform during this build
- 307 shell assertions, all passing, or this build would have refused to write
- 4 JavaScript panels you can edit and re-run in the page
- 4 listings shown but not run, each stating why on the panel itself
- AWS commands run against a free, local, no-signup stand-in (moto), not a real AWS account
- No network at read time, and no third-party npm packages: everything is the standard toolchain
Foundations
The shell, the filesystem, processes and real networking. Every DevOps tool is built on top of these.
4 of 4 written
Git, properly
Not "add, commit, push" by memory. What a commit actually is, and how branching and review work.
3 of 3 written
Containers
What a container actually is, real Dockerfiles and images, and running more than one of them together.
4 of 4 written
Cloud fundamentals
IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and FaaS; regions and blast radius; the Shared Responsibility Model. Vendor-neutral, before any one vendor.
3 of 3 written
AWS compute & networking
IAM, VPC and EC2, run for real against a free local AWS. Least privilege from the start, not bolted on later.
4 of 4 written
AWS storage & databases
S3 is not a filesystem. RDS is not DynamoDB. Real uploads, real tables, and how to pick between them.
3 of 3 written
AWS serverless
Functions as infrastructure, and the queues and topics that connect them without either side waiting.
3 of 3 written
Infrastructure as Code
Why click-ops fails at scale, and real Terraform: providers, state, modules, and the plan/apply/destroy loop.
4 of 4 written
CI/CD
What a pipeline actually is, a real pipeline file, and the deployment strategies that keep a bad release small.
3 of 3 written
Kubernetes
The problem it solves that Compose does not, and real manifests: Pods, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Ingress.
4 of 4 written
Observability
Metrics, logs and traces, a real Prometheus and Grafana stack, and alerting that does not cry wolf.
3 of 3 written
Security
Least privilege worked out by hand, secrets that never belong in a repo, and the misconfigurations that actually get exploited.
3 of 3 written
Cost & production readiness
Pricing models you calculate by hand, incident response, and the system design questions this job gets asked.
3 of 3 written