Cloud Engineer

Learning to think like a cloud engineer

I have not held a paid Cloud Engineer title yet. This page documents the cloud-related work I have completed, the environments I have practiced in, and the areas where I still need mentorship.

What I have

Completed guided AWS internship lab exercises with documented runbooks.
Personal deployments on GitHub Pages and Render.
Documentation habits that track failures and fixes.

What I don’t have yet

Ownership of production AWS environments or multi-account architecture design.
On-call rotations or customer ticket ownership.
Enterprise-scale incident response experience.

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.

Internship practice (internal + lab-style)

AWS Cloud Support Engineer internship (Summer 2025): completed lab exercises, built CloudWatch dashboards, performed IAM investigations, and wrote runbooks in training environments.
Worked in guided rotations and lab-style environments; did not own production AWS accounts or independently resolve live customer tickets.

Personal deployments (public, small-scale)

Car-Match backend deployed to Render with README runbooks.
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.

AWS internship labs

Built CloudWatch dashboards + SNS alerts for sample environments (documented in internship recap post).
Automated repetitive lab support workflows using shell scripts and AWS CLI.
Logged every limitation (no customer-facing tickets alone) so expectations stay realistic.

Proof links: Internship recap post

Portfolio prototypes

Car-Match repo shows env vars, README runbooks, 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

CloudWatch dashboards — lab + personalIAM basics + Access Analyzer — lab onlyS3 / Lambda labs — lab onlyGitHub 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.

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 in real production settings.

If you are hiring for junior cloud roles and provide coaching in these areas, I am open to discussing opportunities.

Cloud Engineer

Learning to think like a cloud engineer

Clear scope, upfront

What I have

What I don’t have yet

What I’m doing next

What my 'cloud' reps actually look like

Internship practice (internal + lab-style)

Personal deployments (public, small-scale)

Proof (student-level, transparent)

AWS internship labs

Portfolio prototypes

Stack in rotation (with AI help)

Mentorship wishlist