Provisioning and monitoring on-prem cloud infrastructure at NCS

Problem

NCS runs infrastructure for enterprise clients, and provisioning it by hand doesn't scale — every new environment needs to be reproducible, monitored, and recoverable without one engineer being the single point of knowledge.

My Role

Cloud Engineer, responsible for provisioning, monitoring, and maintaining a mix of on-prem and cloud-adjacent infrastructure.

Approach

• Provisioning: Used Terraform to provision resources as infrastructure-as-code rather than manual setup, so environments are reproducible and reviewable.
• Monitoring: Implemented Grafana and CloudWatch so infrastructure health and performance are visible rather than discovered after something breaks.
• Virtualization: Deployed and configured virtualization infrastructure on VMware ESXi, and handled day-to-day system administration across Windows Server environments.
• Networking: Configured networking devices and VLAN segmentation to keep environments properly isolated.
• Data durability: Installed and configured backups for SQL Server databases.

Outcome

A more reproducible, observable infrastructure baseline — environments can be provisioned consistently, and issues surface through dashboards instead of support tickets.

What I'd improve next

Push more of the Terraform configuration into version control with CI-driven plan/apply, and extend Grafana dashboards to cover the VMware layer, not just the workloads running on top of it.