Howdy Friends!

Welcome to the first episode.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to start this.

Over the years, I've learned a lot from people sharing their experiences. This is my attempt to do the same.

I’m trying to recall everything from the beginning, so I’ll keep it simple and honest.

My IT journey began in 2016, when I started my Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Information Technology.

Before that, I remember studying computers in school up to grade 7, learning basic computer hardware and MS-DOS.

Even the simplest HTML/CSS was new to me in my bachelor’s, and I had no clue about C programming. I felt lost, especially since my friends were already good at these from their school background.

I struggled during the first year of my bachelor’s with programming and other subjects, but luckily, the college turned out to be very good for me, as I got a lot of opportunities to grow.

During my second year, I started a paid internship in the IT department at my college. There, I learned basic networking concepts like routing, switching, DNS, and firewalls using Cisco and FortiGate.

Later, I started deploying college websites to production servers running on Linux. It was really fun, as we had many experimental and production sites built using different technologies.

That was when I learned about hosting services like Apache HTTPD and Tomcat. All the websites and databases ran on a single server, which I now know is called a monolithic setup. It was simple, but I learned a lot from it.

At that time, I was working on on-premises servers using VMware ESXi. I even built my first public server using a dedicated public IP.

That experience completely changed how I viewed servers. I became deeply interested in fixing issues, even when I did not fully understand them at first. I learned how to find solutions effectively on the internet.

That phase really built my confidence as an intern.

Until then, I was still working with on-prem servers. Later, I was given access to the college AWS account, where I could use EC2 and S3.

I used to explore the AWS console and had PEM keys to access instances, but I was completely blank on how to actually use them.

Then I got another internship, this time as a Cloud Intern at a real cloud-based tech company.

Everything I learned in my previous internship started to make sense in a production environment. Although I wasn’t allowed to directly work on production systems, I could understand what was going on. That was when I got my real introduction to AWS.

For six months, I worked with common AWS services like EC2, EBS, Snapshots, S3, ALB, and RDS. This helped me connect my on-premises knowledge to the cloud.

Alongside the internship, my college provided $500 in AWS credits for learning, and I used that to practice on my own.

After completing my bachelor's, I was hired by the same company as an Associate Cloud Engineer. I started handling production systems and learned how critical change windows, backups, monitoring, and security are. That was a big step for me.

Later, I got promoted to Cloud Engineer.

I had a basic understanding of programming in Python and Bash, and my team lacked automation for operational tasks. This was a great opportunity for me to contribute, so I started implementing automation in AWS.

From there, my programming skills improved, and I began to feel more confident.

I automated simple operational overhead tasks like starting and stopping resources, generating reports, rotating keys, and managing backups. This focus on automation helped me better understand efficiency.

During this period, I was more focused on deploying and maintaining cloud resources. By this time, I was confident in creating AWS resources and had gained good knowledge of different AWS services, including how to troubleshoot and manage them.

Looking back, I consider this phase the golden foundation of my cloud skills, and I feel lucky to have been on this path.

After a few years, the company grew through an acquisition. Eventually, our Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams combined to form a Platform Team, and I became a Platform Engineer.

I was introduced to CI/CD, release processes, and DevOps best practices. I enjoyed building pipelines for smooth deployments and worked on several deployments and internal applications using serverless and containers.

Later, I was promoted again to Senior Platform Engineer, focusing on research and long running tasks to streamline operations.

My first major research project was automating resource patching across multiple AWS accounts using AWS SSM and Lambda. This greatly reduced operational workload, especially as we were managing around 24 AWS accounts.

The company acquisition also helped me gain new experience, like bringing multiple accounts into a single organization, handling conflicting network migrations, and adapting to new standards.

Later, I was assigned to another major project. I worked on an operating system migration project as CentOS 7 was reaching end of life, and we chose Rocky Linux. I led the planning and migration efforts across the organization.

We also improved our security posture through system hardening and configuration best practices using golden images. This project further boosted my knowledge and confidence.

In 2024, my office provided me with free vouchers to take AWS certification exams. I completed the AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate, which were my first certifications.

While preparing, I had actually underestimated certifications, but they helped me learn new things about the same services and technologies I had already been using.

That’s when I realized how much certifications can enhance your knowledge. From then on, I decided to pursue as many as I could.

So far, I have achieved 5 AWS certifications.

Later in 2025, I was promoted to Principal Platform Engineer. These days, I spend more time researching problems, designing solutions, and working on long-term initiatives across the platform. I enjoy what I do, but I’ve also realized that to go further, I need to go deeper.

Recently in 2026, I’ve been involved in one of the biggest projects of my career. It involves decommissioning a decade-old architecture and rebuilding it to meet modern requirements. The system primarily handles secure file transfers between clients and the organization.

Working on this project gave me a lot of insights. I started seeing beyond cloud operations and DevOps. It pushed me toward distributed system, architecture and system design at scale.

After all these years, I feel like I'm starting to see where I want to go next.

I don't have all the answers yet, but I've become more interested in how large systems are designed, scaled, and evolved over time.

So these days, I spend more time reading, learning, and experimenting in that direction.

We'll see where it takes me.

For now, my goal is simple: to become a better cloud architect.

Thank you for reading my first letter.

Until next time,
Alon