Cloud practice with proof up front
I practiced cloud engineering through an AWS Cloud Support Engineer internship and small public deployments. The internship focused on guided rotations and troubleshooting labs rather than production customer work, and my personal projects focus on small deployments where limitations and cost tradeoffs are documented.- AWS internship: guided support rotations in training environments, not direct ownership of live customer tickets.
- Serverless capstone: Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, Amplify, and a metadata extraction workflow.
- Cost modeling: documented estimates for upload and retrieval costs using explicit assumptions.
- Public proof: Render and GitHub Pages deployments plus blog posts about AWS budgets and free-tier mistakes.
Clear scope, upfront
What I have
- Guided AWS internship reps with troubleshooting notes and written assumptions.
- Small public deployments on GitHub Pages and Render.
- Write-ups that document failures, costs, and limitations instead of hiding them.
What I am still working toward
- Ownership of production AWS environments or multi-account architecture design.
- On-call rotations or customer ticket ownership.
- Deeper IAM and security review experience outside labs.
What I’m doing next
- IAM policy drills and security review practice.
- Terraform plan/apply reps in a sandbox account.
- Small monitoring project with alerts + cost guardrails.
What my 'cloud' reps actually look like
Internship practice (internal + lab-style)
I did real cloud practice in the internship, but it happened in guided environments. That matters because the work was useful and technical, while still being different from owning live customer infrastructure.
- Cloud Support Engineer Intern (Capstone Project), AWS, Seattle, WA, May 2025 - Aug 2025.
- Built a serverless metadata extraction workflow using Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and Amplify.
- Implemented a documented cost model for upload and retrieval estimates.
- Worked in guided rotations and lab-style environments rather than production customer accounts.
Personal deployments (public, small-scale)
Outside the internship, my cloud reps come from deploying and documenting smaller projects where the limitations are visible and easy to audit.
- Car-Match backend deployed to Render with README troubleshooting notes.
- Interactive Pokédex and AnimalSounds deployed to GitHub Pages.
- Free-tier cold starts can take several minutes; this limitation is documented in project READMEs.
- Blog posts documenting how I configure budgets, monitor bills, and keep honesty logs of what’s broken.
Proof (student-level, transparent)
AWS internship labs
The strongest cloud proof I have right now comes from the internship capstone and the documentation around it.
- Built CloudWatch dashboards + SNS alerts for sample environments (documented in internship recap post).
- Automated repetitive lab support workflows using shell scripts and AWS CLI.
- Capstone: metadata extraction workflow with a documented cost model for review.
- Logged every limitation so the page does not overstate the work.
Portfolio prototypes
- Car-Match repo shows env vars, README troubleshooting notes, and Render deployment notes.
- Interactive Pokédex and AnimalSounds document GitHub Pages deployment steps.
Proof links: Car-Match repo, Interactive Pokédex repo, Interactive Pokédex live, AnimalSounds repo, AnimalSounds live
Stack in rotation (with AI help)
CloudWatch dashboards - lab + personalIAM basics + Access Analyzer - lab onlyS3 / Lambda - capstone project + labGitHub Actions - personal CI basicsDocker Compose - local dev onlyTerraform - tutorial stage
Each repository documents the maturity of the tools used. Experimental work is explicitly labeled in the project documentation.
Mentorship wishlist
- Designing real multi-account AWS environments (beyond labs).
- Deep dive into IAM policy design and security reviews.
- Automated testing/validation for Terraform + deployment pipelines.
- Incident response expectations in real production settings.
If you are hiring for junior cloud roles and provide coaching in these areas, I am open to discussing opportunities.