Cloud Engineer to DevOps Manager

Looking back, my journey in tech has been nothing short of a rollercoaster. It all started when I joined my first company 7EDGE in Mangalore, as a Cloud Engineer. 

When I joined, we were a small team of just 15 employees in Mangalore Branch. I completed my training in just 16 days and jumped straight into my first project—Megadolls. From there, I worked across multiple eCommerce and food ordering applications, gaining hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure. Around the same time, we ventured into event-driven architectures with AWS, despite having zero prior knowledge of Lambda, EventBridge, or DynamoDB. 

A year flew by, and I was honored with Employee of the Month it happened to be my birthday month. That recognition fueled my hunger to do more. 

As we strongly believe in Test First SDLC, we explore all the tasks and tests that should happen before development, which led us to realize the need for a strong CI/CD pipeline. Our CEO Ashu Kajekar built a small team to take on this challenge. Initially, we struggled even to add a single step. After a few months, I was surprised to learn that one of my teammates had resigned, but I decided to keep pushing forward. 

After three intense months, we built a 13-step CI/CD pipeline, We extended our pipeline to DevSecOps, drawing inspiration from Gartner documentation. Initially, understanding Gartner’s implementation approach was incredibly difficult, but after endless discussions, we cracked all steps—except Mobile CI/CD. 

For Mobile CI/CD, we started automating with Fastlane. We succeeded with Android, but iOS remained a challenge due to certificate installations. To solve this, we explored Azure DevOps for iOS deployment, which helped streamline the process.

I dived deep into testing strategies, especially BDD—which, at the time, was practiced by only 26% of the industry globally. There were no implementation materials, only theoretical insights from Gartner and John Ferguson Smart . It was tough, but passion kept us going. We cracked it. 

Then came another major hurdle—running BDD tests in the pipeline. Initially, we explored BrowserStack, but due to some resource constraints, we couldn’t achieve this. We pivoted and successfully integrated BDD automation for web applications in our pipeline. 

One of the biggest wins? Bringing Living Documentation into the organization! What started as a dream became a celebration moment when we saw it in action. 

After building a strong CI/CD pipeline, we started focusing on reliability—and this is where my journey as an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) began. 

We explored monitoring tools like New Relic, implementing them halfway, but before we could fully roll them out, a big surprise was waiting for me. 

By this time, I had completed my 2nd year. Suddenly, a new challenge emerged—few of my colleagues started to quit, and the company faced a critical shortage of Python developers for a high-priority project. 

What started as a temporary adjustment turned into something much bigger—I traveled overnight to the client location and ended up staying for 5 months at an enterprise manufacturing company. 

This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. The application we built didn’t just work—it transformed the business to the next higher level.

And the best part? This entire infrastructure runs at just a few hundred dollars on AWS, with the database costing only $5!

I spent five intense months there, delivering critical solutions. But after much debate and persistence, I transitioned fully into DevOps. Not only the role but also relocated to Bangalore 

Just when things were running smoothly, costs started skyrocketing due to excessive CI/CD pipeline run minutes. Managing this overhead became a challenge, by exploring CircleCI, TravisCI, and Azure DevOps so we transitioned to Azure DevOps, after extensive evaluation. 

This shift also allowed me to solve environmental disparity by introducing Terraform. I then focused on multi-tenant architectures, streamlining serverless deployments, and ultimately, my journey led me to a managerial track. 

This journey—filled with struggles, learnings, and victories—taught me that persistence is everything. Today, as I step into a managerial role, I carry forward these lessons, always striving to build scalable, efficient, and cost-effective solutions. 

Along the way, I’ve also focused on expanding my expertise. I am proud to share that I have achieved AWS Certified Developer Associate, AWS DevOps Professional, AWS AI Practitioner and IIMBx People Management with Impact by Vasanthi Shrinivas certifications! These certifications reflect my commitment to continuous learning and staying ahead in the evolving cloud ecosystem. 

From a beginner struggling with cloud concepts to leading DevOps initiatives, my journey has been built on resilience, learning, and problem-solving. 

To those starting out: Embrace challenges. Stay patient. Keep learning. Growth is inevitable.