Day 40 of My Cloud Engineering Journey: Completing Terraform Fundamentals and Defining My DevOps Path

Today I completed the Terraform Basics course on KodeKloud.

This final section covered:

• Terraform functions
• Conditional expressions
• Terraform Workspaces (OSS)
• Hands-on labs using functions, conditionals, and workspaces

Although today’s lessons wrapped up the course, I spent just as much time reflecting on where I want this journey to take me.

Terraform has honestly been one of the more challenging technologies I’ve learned so far. It was my first exposure to Infrastructure as Code, and there were plenty of concepts that required multiple passes before they started making sense. But that’s also why I’m glad I stuck with it instead of moving on the moment things became difficult.

Looking back over the past several weeks, I’ve now built foundational knowledge in Linux, completed a DevOps prerequisite course, and finished Terraform Basics. None of those topics came naturally at first, but every lesson made the next one a little easier.

One realization became much clearer today. I don’t just want to become a cloud engineer. I want to intentionally position myself toward becoming a Cloud DevOps Engineer.

Automation has always fascinated me. Coming from a Quality Assurance background where much of my work involved manual testing and validating systems, I naturally find myself asking how things can be automated, made more reliable, and deployed consistently. Terraform gave me my first real glimpse into that mindset.

As I continue learning, I also want to start building projects alongside these courses. My goal wasn’t to rush into projects before understanding the fundamentals. Instead, I wanted enough exposure so these technologies weren’t completely foreign when it came time to build something meaningful.

Now that Linux and Terraform foundations are in place, I feel much more prepared to start connecting the dots with AWS and eventually larger DevOps projects. There’s still a long road ahead, but every completed course becomes another brick in the foundation.