🧪 Inside the DevOps Engineering Playground

Welcome to the DevOps Engineering Playground — my personal sandbox where I build, break, automate, and learn. This is not your typical enterprise-grade setup. It’s raw, evolving, and driven by curiosity more than compliance.

In this post, I’ll take you behind the scenes: what this repo is all about, what’s under the hood, and how you can learn or build alongside it.

🎯 Why This Playground Exists

There are countless DevOps tools, services, and patterns out there. It's easy to fall into tutorial hell or get stuck reading docs without ever shipping or breaking anything.

This repo exists to flip that script. I wanted a space where I could:

Prototype infrastructure with Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation
Test CI/CD workflows using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins
Learn and fail (and learn again) with tools like Kubernetes, Ansible, Vault, and more
Document my experiments like a lab notebook

🧰 What You'll Find Here

Think of this like a working DevOps lab. Here's a preview of what's inside:

✅ Infrastructure Modules
Modular and reusable code to spin up AWS/GCP resources with Terraform and Pulumi.
✅ CI/CD Experiments
YAML pipelines that build, test, deploy — sometimes even rollback 😅.
✅ Kubernetes Stuff
Helm charts, manifests, local clusters with k3d or kind, and some autoscaling trials.
✅ Secrets & Security
Vault integrations, IAM sandboxing, and automated secret rotation scripts.
✅ Observability Stacks
Logs and metrics with Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, and ELK/EFK setups.
✅ Bash & Python Scripts
Handy CLI tools, automation wrappers, and even some chaos engineering basics.

💻 Sample Workflow: GitHub Actions + Terraform

Here’s a simplified example of one of my CI/CD workflows:

terraform-ci.yaml

name: Terraform CI
 
on:
  push:
    paths:
      - "infra/**"
 
jobs:
  terraform:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup Terraform
        uses: hashicorp/setup-terraform@v2
        with:
          terraform_version: 1.5.0
 
      - name: Terraform Init
        run: terraform init
 
      - name: Terraform Plan
        run: terraform plan
 
      - name: Terraform Apply
        if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
        run: terraform apply -auto-approve

This is just one of many experiments. Some are working, some are a work-in-progress, and a few are intentionally broken so I can test alerts and failure handling.

🌱 What I’ve Learned (So Far)

Version everything — Infra, secrets, configs, dashboards. Treat everything like code.
Don’t over-engineer — Simple pipelines beat complex, brittle ones.
Monitoring isn't optional — You don't know what’s broken if you can't see it.
Keep it fun — If you're not curious, you're just doing chores with YAML.

📖 Follow Along

I’ll be posting more deep dives on specific tools, workflows, and patterns in future blog posts. If you’re into hands-on DevOps and want a break from the polished tutorials, this is the place for you.

You can:

🔍 Explore the GitHub repo
🧭 Fork it and start your own playground
📬 Submit a PR if you build something worth sharing

🔓 100% Free and Open Source

Everything here is MIT-licensed. No locked features. No hidden costs. Just a growing, living DevOps lab open to all.

🙌 Thanks for Dropping By

Whether you're just getting started in DevOps or you're deep into pipelines and platforms, I hope this repo helps spark your curiosity. Try stuff. Break stuff. Learn stuff.

Until next time — happy automating 👋

Inside the DevOps Engineering Playground

Inside the DevOps Engineering Playground

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