Today is officially my last day at my current company as an Associate Cloud Operations Engineer! It is quite a bitter sweet moment but I am super excited for what the future has in store for me. I will always be grateful for this company for taking a chance on me and allowing me to learn, grow, and truthly, open the door into the DevOps world. If you are curious as to what I will be doing next, you will have to read the next blog!
How I Got Started
If you are wondering as to how I got into this position in the first place, check out my last blog post “Hello World!” to find out. To briefly summarize though, I had started my career in the technology field when I first joined the Navy at 19 years old as a Information Technician. There, I learned the tools needed to kick start my career and more importantly, helped me with work ethics and the ability to grind. After my 4 years served, I decided to give college another go and while I was doing school full time, I ended up getting a contracted help desk role with a mid-size education tech company. The contract position lasted about 11 months and decided to take a leap of faith and I was fortunate enough to be able to get an internship as a Cloud Operations Engineer at my current company.
Brief History
A little backstory for the people who think that this was a taking a backward step because at the time, I initially felt like it was taking a backward step myself. I mean, at this time I had about 5 years of experience working as an Information Technician in the tech industry so why would I make this move to an intern? I probably could have easily gone into the IT field with a decent paying job and been on my merry way. I had a wife and two kids at the time as well so taking a internship position would be a major pay cut. For me, it was all about potential and frankly, that was all I needed.
Kind Of Funny
I think the funny thing about being a Cloud Engineer was that I initially interviewed for a Software Engineer intern position at the company. I was studying Computer Science so it made sense to me to get into some sort of Software Engineering role. I mean, that’s what every CS major talks about, is getting into a high paying software engineer role, or maybe that was just me. Anyways, I remembered the interview being about 3 hours long. In my opinion, if you can’t tell whether a person is right for the position within the first hour, you may want to rethink the approach to 3 hour long interviews. Again, just my non-professional opinion. I remember being split up with 2 other interviewees, all much younger than me, and proceed to have group interviews with 4 different groups consisted of 2 interviewers. If that did not make sense, than you are following along just fine. After the interviews were completed, I left feeling very unconfident of the whole thing because again, it was an extremely long process where you essentially forgot what you said and who said it too. It may sound like I am bashing on the interview process, and partly because I am, but I understand the difficulty of hiring people and just wanting the best person for the position. I will probably have to do a whole different blog post regarding my thoughts on tech interviews though. To come back full circle, I ended getting a called from my current manager for one last interview to talk about my experience and what I was looking for in my career. First off, I didn’t even know there was a position called, “Cloud Engineer” and secondly, the position sounded awesome. It seemed like I would do a little bit of coding, in Python, and included learning more about the cloud and tools used in a SDLC. I immediately felt like this would lead me down the path I wanted. My manager and I clicked right away and the next day, he offered me the position.
What is Cloud Operations?
Without going into crazy details into what Cloud Operations entails, because it can vary from company to company and I think this is another topic of its own, my day to consists of monitoring and maintaining our AWS infrastructure and providing internal support with product issues. I use a variety of tools throughout my day consisting of Ansible, Vscode, Jira (constantly for tickets), Salesforce, OpsGenie, Bitbucket, and a lot more. We are constantly using python scripts to help with our daily task such as gathering logs and information from our AWS infrastructure. There is much more that we do but again, probably for another blog so if it sounds interesting or if you have questions, feel free to contact me!
Wrapping Up
To conclude with this blog, I just wanted to say, in a super cheesy way, that things happen for a reason and if it wasn’t for taking a leap of faith into an intern position at my current company, I would have never had the opportunity that I have today. It is a bittersweet moment leaving the cloud but I am on the path I want and excited about what the future has to offer for me. If you are at all curious about my journey and what comes next, I will be posting more soon and updating the readers as much as possible. Thank you for everyone who has helped me get this to where I am today, I 100% could not have done it alone. Much love to you all.