Early notes as a Cloud Engineer

Most of my Infrastructure Engineer work began on-prem: VMware ESXi, Windows Server, VLAN segmentation, SQL Server backups. I recognised that learning them well, underpinned most of the cloud infrastructure we see today.

Where it overlaps

Terraform allows modular provisioning regardless if it is a VM on ESXi or an instance in a public cloud. Infrastructure as code allows a single source of truth rather than relying on run-books and siloed information.

Grafana and CloudWatch dashboards exist so that we can monitor infrastructure health, which is necessary in both environments.

Going into a VM in a VLAN and setting up a DNS server gives you a deep appreciation for the amount of steps that Terraform and cloud has saved.

Where it doesn't overlap

On-prem work doesn't really provide elasticity. In cloud, we have the ability to provision and tear down capacity on demand instead of racking a server. However, the ability to see different granularities still matter for things to be done and done well.