From Learning DevOps to Building Real Projects: My Journey with AWS, Terraform, and Kubernetes 🚀

Ashish Thakur — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 07:00:04 +0000

Hey DEV Community! 👋

I'm Ash, an aspiring Cloud and DevOps engineer, and this is my first post here.

Over the past few months, I've been focusing on moving beyond theory and building hands-on projects to understand how modern cloud infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, and monitoring work together.

One thing I've learned along the way is that learning a tool and understanding how to use it in a real environment are two very different things.

🛠️ What I've Been Building

Rather than learning tools in isolation, I've been trying to connect them through practical projects.

Here's a glimpse of what I've explored so far:

☁️ AWS & Terraform

Building cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code, working with VPCs, networking, IAM, and Terraform modules.

🐳 Docker & Kubernetes

Containerizing applications, deploying workloads, and learning how container orchestration works in practice.

⚙️ CI/CD & Deployment Strategies

Building automated pipelines and experimenting with blue-green and canary deployments to understand how application releases can be made safer.

📊 Monitoring & Observability

Exploring Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and other tools to understand how to monitor infrastructure, collect metrics, and detect issues.

🤖 Autonomous DevOps & Self-Healing

Exploring how automation can help detect incidents, respond to failures, and reduce manual operational work.

These projects are helping me connect individual tools to the bigger picture of building and operating reliable systems.

💡 What Has Taught Me the Most?

Honestly, it's not the commands that have taught me the most. It's the errors.

An IAM permission issue that blocks an infrastructure deployment.

A CI/CD pipeline that fails during testing.

A container that starts but doesn't behave as expected.

A configuration that looks correct but produces an unexpected result.

Every issue forces me to investigate, read logs, understand the underlying concept, and try a different approach.

I'm beginning to appreciate that DevOps isn't simply about knowing Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, or AWS.

It's about understanding systems, automating repetitive work, troubleshooting failures, and continuously improving reliability.

And that's the part I enjoy most: figuring out why something broke and how to fix it properly.

🎯 Why I'm Starting to Write on DEV

I want to document my learning journey and share things that might help someone else who's on a similar path.

I'll be writing about:

Practical AWS and Terraform projects.
Docker, Kubernetes, and containerization.
Jenkins, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment strategies.
Monitoring, observability, and incident troubleshooting.
Real errors, debugging experiences, and lessons learned along the way.

I don't claim to know everything, and I don't think I need to.

My goal is to keep learning, build things that work, understand why they work, and share what I discover.

Hopefully, these articles will be useful to other learners while helping me become a better engineer, too.

🤝 Let's Connect!

If you're learning Cloud, DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering, I'd love to connect and learn from your experiences.

Here's a question to kick things off:

What's one technical problem you've faced that taught you something no tutorial could?

Drop it in the comments. I'd genuinely love to hear your story!

Let's keep building, breaking, debugging, and learning. 🚀

Thanks for reading!

— Ash