My journey into DevOps began with a baptism of fire. Infrastructure was still in its infant stages, with little to no infrastructure as code. Everything was done manually in the AWS console. This hands-on approach provided a deep understanding of cloud resources and their interactions.
The application was a Java web server hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Our CI/CD pipeline relied on a self-hosted Jenkins instance. Maven artifacts were stored in Nexus, while application monitoring was handled by AWS CloudWatch. For logging, we deployed an ELK stack and experimented with the beta version of Graylog. It was a thrilling and challenging time, laying the foundation for my future in DevOps.