Last updated on August 31, 2022
Hello! I’m Sam, welcome to my blog! I’m a veteran System Administrator who is working on making the transition to working in the cloud, and you can find out more about me here. My intention here is to document that journey, along with anything else of interest that comes up.
I’ve been realizing recently that while I love a lot about my current job, particularly many of the people I work with, I think I’ve hit the point where there’s really just not room for the sort of progression I’d like to have in my career. That sounds a little cliché, I suppose, but it’s also true. My current job has taken me from a kid with only about a year of experience doing desktop support under his belt to someone who is comfortable taking on any aspect of infrastructure, who can quickly skill up on whatever new technology my faculty (particularly the researchers) want to use, and is able to act as one of the more senior “go-to” admins on my team. I really want to stretch more, but I don’t see that happening where I am.
I’ve always been fascinated with virtualization, so moving towards working with cloud technologies seemed like the next logical step. After reading up a bit, I decided working towards the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification was probably the best path forward. I started working through Adrian Cantril’s wonderful online course, and about two and a half months later, passed the exam. I started applying for jobs right away, without much success. I started to realize that, while the certification is a good step, the cloud workflow is just such a different beast, and employers are looking for someone who can demonstrate that they know how to be productive in this environment. I needed to get some hands-on experience, and with a range of tools. But where to start?
A number of people pointed me at the Cloud Resume Challenge. The idea is to build an online presence using the exact tools I need to learn – hosting a web site in AWS, making use of DynamoDB and Lambda, configuring them through a template instead of manually, setting up Github and using it as a CI/CD pipeline for both back end and front end code. It seems like exactly what I need to get started.
I’m not starting from scratch, either. During my studying for the AWS-SAA, I’d already purchased domain through Route 53, transferred it to my personal account, and set up a basic static website in S3 that points to it. That’s steps 1 and 6 already done!
What’s next:
- Get my resume set up in HTML – done
- Style it with CSS – done
- Upload web pages to S3
- Set up a certificate and force HTTPS usage
- Create a visitor counter in Javascript
- Set up a DynamoDB database to save the visitor count
- Use Lambda and the AWS API gateway to communicate with the database
- Use python to script the Lambda functions
- Incorporate tests into the python code
- Build all of these into a reusable template using either AWS SAM or Terraform (or maybe both?)
- Make sure all the code is in a GitHub repository
- Set up GitHub Actions to push committed code to s3
- Finally, at a minimum a short blog post describing what I’ve learned. I intend to do this instead as a step by step series
After I’ve accomplished all of this, I’ll reassess. There are a number of other tools I want to work on; specifically Ansible (and maybe Puppet), Docker, and Kubernetes. I’ve used Docker a bit already, but the other two I have only really basic knowledge. A Cloud Guru also has a lot of projects to try, so I’ll see what else I feel is lacking. I also have a vague idea that once I’ve figured out how to do some of these projects, the next step is to figure out how to automate them, probably with either CloudFormation or Terraform (or both).
Right now, this seems like a pretty daunting list. I know I’m capable of doing all of these tasks, but it might take a bit to get through it all, particularly with the demands of my job. I’m impatient to get going, though, so….let’s dig in!
Originally Published February 9, 2022
Be First to Comment