Introduction: Until now, most of my DevOps journey had been software-driven. Cloud, containers, automation scripts, and lots of terminal work. But this time, I decided to get physical. I ordered my very first Raspberry Pi and spent a Saturday afternoon putting it all together. It was exciting, nerve-racking, and deeply rewarding. I even snapped a few pictures while assembling everything (I’ll include them below for some visual fun). There’s something special about seeing your hands bring to life a small but mighty computer that will become the centerpiece of your home network’s monitoring and ad-blocking system.

Introduction: Over the past few weeks, I gave myself a personal challenge, to stop just studying DevOps and actually start doing DevOps. That meant real-world projects. Projects that solve a problem, follow best practices, and simulate what I’d be doing in a Cloud DevOps Engineer role. This is one of those projects. Let me walk you through what I built, why I built it, and what I learned along the way.

Introduction: Not long ago, I set out to deploy a simple React app, nothing fancy, just something I built with Tailwind and a bit of JavaScript. But then I thought: What if I treated this like a real production app — the kind I’d work on as a Cloud DevOps Engineer? What started as a personal project quickly evolved into a full-blown DevOps lab with automation, infrastructure as code, and a serious focus on security.

Introduction: When people ask me how I got into Linux, I usually smile, because it wasn’t out of ambition or some deep technical calling. It all started with a really slow computer. I was around 13 or 14 when a friend, already dabbling in systems engineering, told me “Hey, why not try Linux?” At the time, Windows ran like molasses on my old hardware. My friend was right, Linux might just be the fix I needed.

Introduction: There’s something deeply satisfying about pushing a button (or committing a line of code) and watching your entire deployment pipeline go to work automatically, reliably, and without lifting another finger. That’s the core of what I wanted to build with this project: a hands-on DevOps pipeline that connects GitHub Actions to AWS, Docker, and a live running application. While the React app itself is a cappuccino companion I built for fun (because yes, I love coffee), the main goal of this project wasn’t to launch the next big coffee app, it was to learn and implement a production-like CI/CD workflow from scratch, and do it using AWS free tier services.

Introduction: I’ve always wanted a place where I could document my journey into tech, especially as I transition from being a technical artist to a DevOps engineer. But I didn’t just want any blog. I wanted something clean, fast, and most importantly, automated. That way, I could focus on writing, not fiddling with deployment. So I decided to build my blog using a stack that aligned with the tools I love:

Introduction: Building real world projects is one of the best ways to learn, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do with this one. This project was my way of testing everything I’ve been learning about DevOps, AWS, and Infrastructure as Code in a practical and hands-on way. So, what’s the project about? I created a fully automated cloud infrastructure on AWS using Terraform, where I deployed a web server (Nginx) inside an EC2 instance.