[scarface_74]

At my n-2 job (2017-mid 2018), I was the dev lead when management decided to “move to the cloud”. They hired a bunch of “consultants” who were old school operations people who only knew how to do lift and shifts.

I didn’t know cloud from a whole in the wall. But the internal IT department treated AWS just like they did their Colo. I thought AWS was just a bunch of VMs and I treated it as such for a green field implementation.

I studied for the AWS Solution Architect certification just so I would know what I didn’t know and to be able to come up with some intelligent ideas for phase 2.

I ended up leaving that job and working for a startup. The CTO knew I had only theoretical knowledge of AWS. But I had good system design instincts and he liked my ideas. I was hired as a senior developer. But that rapidly morphed into a cloud architect role. I took advantage of AWS and all of its locked in goodness including moving everything to either Lambda and Fargate (serverless Docker).

I had admin rights to everything until I voluntarily gave myself the same constraints to production that everyone else had when we hired a couple of operation guys.

We scaled without any issues as the company grew and Covid happened - we worked in the healthcare industry.

Now I work for AWS. But I’ve done my share of managing servers since the mid 90s as part of my job. That’s a life I don’t ever want to go back to.