It all started from a project with the undergrad student. I mentored one of the student to do his project, to deploy our products to the cloud, so our clients can use the services, to integrate our service into their solution. At that time, I was so busy with other project tasks, not able to help him much, even let him run the project by his own (and I do felt guilty about it 🥲)

At the end of the project, he successfully deploy our product to the cloud (using docker, kubernetes), with details of instructions, and also without using any cloud tool (like aks on Azure). And I had to get used to it and able to maintain it after he finished the project. I had to repeat myself and followed the instruction one by one. I did ask him many of stupid questions (“green dinosaur” 🦖 as I usually said to myself). Eventually, I can deploy the project, with a lot of struggles, so confused about a lot of terms (what is the pod, what is the node, why have to config all the networks, service, ingress, all the preview modules in azure cli,…).

There are few things that help me along the way, are

• I understood and enjoyed myself is with docker/containers. I can build the application with dockerfile and run docker images, containers, etc.
• I understand our application and what modules, API that it needed to functioning (that including the websocket, restapi)
• I worked with ubuntu daily, so the commandline and some configs are not too foreign.
• I understood that networks are my nightmare. I almost failed the subject about network, operating system in uni, so you know, I am not good at them at all 🫥, but they are critical in devops pipeline and setup.

With a lot of helps from my student, and project sponsors (so I can use the cloud resources freely), my prof (he allowed us to do whatever it requires to deliver) (It sounded like I writing acknowledgement 🤭), I finished them, and instantly got hook. I enjoy them so much although many things still unclear. With other readings, mentoring few more students, I started understanding it even more.

With the projects requirement, I had chance to expose to AWS too but not too much. And everything till this point all related to the public cluster, with very simple settings and everything else kept default.

Around end of 2020, I extended my boundary by joining the non profit organization with many young talents, for the education purpose. I got accepted to that team, and volunteer as the DevOps engineer. To my surprise, I am the first to the team (of course there is another member set the ground works for the team first, but he is not officially joining the team, and only to help at the beginning).

In our volunteering team, we use DigitalOcean cloud to manage and deploy services, products. I had my first “on-call” incident by bring down the database service. Immediately I got call to handle the issue with the help from other members. That made me panic and stress for some time 🥶🥵. From that incident, I am more slowly to do experiments, scaring I will bring down the system again.

With a lot of struggles, trial and error, and learn from many experts (though they are much younger than me), I learnt a lot more and continue with many exciting things in DevOps career.