Six Months in Infrastructure

• 2019/03/08

Introduction

I spent half a year focused on infrastructure after moving from a Tokyo SIer (Java + Oracle) to a web company in Sapporo. Here is what I learned and what I think aspiring infra engineers should know.

My starting point

I used to sit in an architecture team, obsessing over CSRF tokens and session dumps, writing tools, and managing offshore test handoffs. I wanted more hands-on development, so I switched companies—only to end up on the infra team. At the time my skills were basically Java, Spring MVC, Oracle, MySQL. I had never installed Linux on my own PC and only knew a handful of commands from doing app deployments.

Studying like crazy

When I joined, my infra knowledge was too weak, so I focused on the essentials.

1. SSH

You cannot do anything without SSH. Learn public/private keys, known_hosts, and authorized_keys.

2. AWS

AWS is everywhere. At minimum understand EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, S3, IAM, and VPC. For bonus points add Route 53, ELB, and Lambda.

3. Virtualization

Expect to work with Kubernetes, Docker, Vagrant/VirtualBox, etc. They let you spin up CentOS or Ubuntu locally with ease.

4. Shell/Bash

Infrastructure work begs for automation, so you need to write shell scripts (.sh) to wire commands together.

Bonus: Ansible

Our team leans heavily on Ansible for configuration management, provisioning, large file transfers, and reducing human error. Documentation abounds, so dig in.

Closing

Lately I have been tasked with migrating workloads from on-prem to AWS, which forces me to learn DNS, SSL, and more. Infra may seem unglamorous to developers, but it is the foundation—so it matters.