EP1: My Journey into the Cloud

How I started, what I learned, and where I’m heading next

Howdy Friends!

It has been a while since my last post.

I was on Diwali vacation and had a great time in my hometown, Dharan, Nepal.

Even during my vacation, I kept thinking about how to start this newsletter. This is my first one, and honestly, I had no idea where to begin.

I am not an expert in cloud yet, but I have decided to share my lessons and experiences through this letter in an episode format as I continue my journey to become a better cloud architect.

So, welcome to the first episode.

In this one, I will share how my cloud journey began and where I am today.

I am trying to recall everything from the start, but I will keep it as short as possible.

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I completed my Bachelors in Computer Science and Information Technology.

During my second year, I started an internship at my college. There, I learned about basic networking like routing, switching, DNS, and firewalls using Cisco and FortiGate.

Later, I started deploying our college websites to production servers running on Linux. That was when I learned about hosting services like Apache HTTPD and Tomcat. All the websites and databases used to run on a single server, which I now know is called a monolithic setup. It was simple, but I learned a lot from it.

At that time, I was working on on-premises servers using VMware ESXi. I even built my first public server using a dedicated public IP.

That experience completely changed how I viewed servers. I became deeply interested in fixing issues, even when I did not fully understand them at first. I learned how to find solutions effectively on the internet.

That phase really built my confidence as an intern. Then I got another internship, this time as a Cloud Intern at a real tech company.

Everything I learned in my previous internship started to make sense in production environments. Though I was not allowed to touch production directly, I could understand what was going on. That was when I got introduced to AWS.

For six months, I worked with common AWS services like EC2 Instance, EBS, Snapshots, S3, ALB, and RDS. It helped me connect my on premises knowledge to the cloud.

After completing the internship, I was hired as an Associate Cloud Engineer. I started handling production systems and learned how critical change windows, monitoring, and security are. That was a big step for me.

Later, I got promoted to Cloud Engineer.

I had a basic idea of programming with Python and Bash, so I started implementing automation in AWS. I automated simple tasks like starting and stopping instances, generating reports, and managing backups. This focus on automation helped me understand efficiency better.

Eventually, our Cloud Operations and DevOps teams merged to form a Platform Team, and I became a Platform Engineer.

I was introduced to CI CD, release processes, and DevOps best practices. I enjoyed building pipelines for smooth deployments and worked on several deployments and internal applications using serverless and containers.

Later, I was promoted again to Senior Platform Engineer, focusing on research and long running tasks to streamline operations.

My first big research project was to fully automate cloud resource patching using AWS SSM and Lambda. This reduced a lot of operational workload.

Right after that, I worked on an operating system migration project since CentOS 7 was reaching end of life, and we chose Rocky Linux. I led the planning and migration efforts. We also improved our security posture through system hardening and configuration best practices. That project boosted my knowledge and confidence even further.

This year, my office provided me a free voucher to attend AWS certification exams. I completed AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate which were my first certifications.

In 2025, I was promoted to Principal Platform Engineer. Now I focus more on research, design, and long term initiatives. I enjoy what I do, but I have also realized that to go further, I need to grow deeper.

Sometimes during technical discussions, especially around architecture, I realized my understanding was not strong enough. So I decided to level up and started doing research to strengthen my foundation.

Then I started wondering how companies like Netflix scale their services and how AWS runs the infrastructure that powers half of the internet. That curiosity has now become my next mission to understand and master architecture.

I want to focus more on system architecture, system design, and distributed systems.

These are the concepts that truly make an architect, understanding how systems work end to end.

So, from the next episode, you will be hearing more from me about this new learning journey.

Thank you for reading my first newsletter. Even though my schedule is busy, I will do my best to keep showing up in your inbox whenever I can.

Until next time,
Alon