A Bit About Me
I’m currently pursuing a Diploma in Cloud and DevOps at IPSR Solutions, building on a BSc in Computer Science from Calicut University. Alongside my diploma, I recently started as a System Administrator Trainee, where I’m getting hands-on exposure to live company projects, working under a team leader, and learning what “production” really means outside of a classroom.
What draws me to this field is the mix of building and breaking things — provisioning infrastructure, automating what used to be manual, and then watching dashboards light up with real metrics.
What I’ve Been Learning
My focus over the last year has centered around a few core pillars:
Cloud Infrastructure (AWS) Working with EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, ALB, EKS, Auto Scaling, and CloudWatch has taught me how to think about systems that don’t just work — they stay up. Designing for high availability across multiple Availability Zones, with Auto Scaling Groups and Lambda-based auto-healing, completely changed how I think about “what happens when something fails.”
Container Orchestration (Kubernetes & Docker) This is where things got fun. Containerizing microservices with Docker and orchestrating them with Kubernetes and Helm taught me about StatefulSets, Ingress controllers, ConfigMaps, and Secrets — the unglamorous plumbing that keeps real applications running.
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform & Ansible) Once you provision your first VPC and EKS cluster through Terraform instead of clicking through a console, there’s no going back. IaC isn’t just convenient — it’s how you make infrastructure reproducible and auditable.
CI/CD & DevSecOps (Jenkins, SonarQube, Trivy) Building pipelines that don’t just deploy code, but actually gate it — blocking builds with HIGH or CRITICAL vulnerabilities — was a turning point in how I think about security. It’s not a separate step anymore; it’s baked into the pipeline.
Monitoring & Observability (Prometheus & Grafana) There’s something satisfying about watching custom application metrics flow into a Grafana dashboard in real time. Monitoring taught me that deploying something is only half the job — knowing how it’s behaving is the other half.
Projects That Taught Me the Most
A few projects stand out as genuine turning points in my learning:
- A Three-Tier Snake Game on AWS EKS — a full microservices app (frontend, backend API, auth service, MongoDB) deployed with Terraform-provisioned infrastructure, Helm charts, Jenkins pipelines, and integrated security scanning. This project alone touched nearly every tool in my stack.
- A DevSecOps CI/CD Pipeline for a Flask App — where I learned to combine automated testing, vulnerability scanning, and Docker Compose into a single reliable pipeline.
- A Highly Available AWS Architecture — designing for failure before it happens, with auto-healing and sub-minute recovery times.