Introduction

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>> Today is going to be a very great start to hopefully what will be a very educational experience for all of you. We're going to be doing a workshop on enterprise cloud infrastructure. That might sound very daunting. [LAUGH] I have taken basically the last six months of projects, things that I've built at the company I work at.

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Things that I've built locally, things that I've built on stream with my community, and I've accumulated that into basically this course. And so the goal of this course, in a lot of ways, hopefully, when you guys walk away from it, is to actually practically know how to build infrastructure.

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You might not build the infrastructure that we build, but you should at least be able to see the problems that you guys deal with and take steps forward with that. So let's go and get started. First and foremost, hello there, I am Erik Reinhart. This is also my follow message every time you follow me on Twitch.

[00:00:57]
So for anyone who watches, you'll appreciate that. I am a software engineer, I'm a senior software engineer. I'm also known as Blackglasses online. So if you've ever heard anyone call me BG or anything like that, that's my that's my tag on the Internet. I am a content creator.

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I stream on the AltF4Stream on Twitch, and we also do YouTube as well. I'm a flowchart artist, as I like to say. I fell in love with making flowcharts when I started working with DevOps, and so it became a big part of what I do and what I create as well.

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And then also, I'm a problem solver. I really wanted to kind of give you guys a perspective of how I see myself because I do feel like it's a part of why I am where I am. So my experience paths, I have a pretty interesting experience path. I started out in frontend, actually.

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I first started technically as a customer support agent at a web hosting company, and then I started building stuff on the CS floor. I got really excited about that, and they started noticing me building things. And they were why is the CS agent programming? And then they brought me over to engineering about a year later and I started working on frontend for a company called Media Temple.

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If you guys have ever heard of Media Temple before, it's, or was, a pretty awesome web hosting company. And I worked on the frontend for that for about three years. I focused heavily on PHP, the good old days, and CSS when it was sass and lass and all of that fun stuff.

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And I did that, yeah, for about three years. And my curiosity is something that's always led me towards the next part of my career. And so I started getting bored with it. There's parts of programming frontend which is really challenging, really fun, and really great. There's other parts to it which are adding buttons and that's not very fun.

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[LAUGH] And I got to a point where unfortunately the company had focused more on selling things than innovating things. And so I felt that, and I was like, I can't do this anymore. And so I actually led towards backend. I was like, all right, well, let's try backend out.

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I've never done this before. And then I ended up actually getting a job doing that. I left Media Temple, I went somewhere else. And I got a job doing backend for about two and a half, three years. And then once again, unfortunately, the company started becoming a little bit more focused on just making money.

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And so I kind of checked out there. And I led towards full stack. And what I started realizing through this process was, is that one, I was accumulating knowledge of each stack as I was going through and getting these different positions, right? But I was also learning what I liked and what I didn't like.

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And that's really hard to do in this industry from time to time, cuz there's so many things out there. There's so many different ways and so many different opportunities. And I get asked a lot, how did you get to DevOps? This is how. I kept following my curiosity.

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And so once I got into full stack, and I really started seeing, wow, I can provision things and create networks and all these other things. Interestingly enough, I actually got a job position to start leaning into DevOps around my third year into full stack. And then that was when I just felt deep down the rabbit hole and really became a problem solver, which is really a lot of what DevOps is.

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So I really started focusing my career on implementation, building things in frontend, and now today I'm supporting those things and helping them grow. So welcome, [LAUGH] welcome to the course. So the introduction to the course, this is actually two things I did in this course. One of them was I added a lot of GIFs.

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Two, there are quotes from AI in between here, so we get to see what AI's perspective on some of these things are. So an introduction to the course, the first quote we have is, if you don't know what problem you're solving, you can't solve them, thanks, AI. [LAUGH] And so the reality of it is that what we're really trying to do is we wanna build off of what we learned in DevOps for Developers.

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And really try and figure out what problems we have to solve, right? And how we're going to solve them. So taking what we learned from the previous course, right? We want to break down common problems an organization has, right? These are just common problems. And a lot of the things about this in this process is just think simply.

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We don't have to overcomplicate and go super down the rabbit hole just yet. We're a brand new company. What are just the simple problems we're gonna deal with out the gate, right? Secondly, and this is very important, who are we solving these problems for? Right, when we talk about money and we talk about a company, if you can't validate what that money's going towards, then it's really, sometimes it's a situation where you might have to take a step back and go, okay, I might just be solving this for myself, right?

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Explain why it's important to solve these problems, right? So once you've decided, okay, what the problem is, how do I identify it? We're gonna then explain, well, why is it important to solve it? If you get past that, if you get past all three of those, then we get to a point where we can actually build something that we feel confident in building.

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So that's that's a big part of the course that we're gonna be trying to do with everything we do in this course. So is DevOps for Developers course required for this course? No, it's not. Not at all, but it will help. The DevOps for Developers course does a great job of creating fundamentals for you as well to help you understand just what the DevOps mindset is.

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I don't think it's required, but if you wanna truly understand the fundamentals of how to think in DevOps world, I do think it'll help. Should you watch it? Yes, you should. [LAUGH] I highly recommend watching it. I think we did a great job on it.