Victory belongs to the most persevering.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
As I evaluate the next steps in my career, it has become clear that my strengths and interests align most closely with infrastructure engineering; spanning both on-premises systems and cloud environments. The target roles I am focusing on are Cloud Engineer and Platform Engineer.
Engineer. To formalize this direction, I am preparing for the Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineering Associate (CNPA) certification offered by the Linux Foundation and CNCF. Achieving this milestone aligns with my long-term career trajectory in core infrastructure while strengthening my professional profile for upcoming opportunities in Canada.
To build a solid foundation, my preparation strategy starts with aligning my mindset through platform engineering tech talks and industry seminars, alongside a structured review of my core technical domains.
Core Competencies
- Kubernetes /Kubernetes as a platform API
- Git
- GitOps
- CI/CD concepts
- Terraform/OpenTofu
- Containers (focus on docker rather than podman)
- YAML
- REST/API concepts
- RBAC (Role based access control; focus on Kubernetes RBAC)
Extended Topics
- Argo CD
- Backstage
- Prometheus
- OpenTelemetry
- Grafana
- Helm
- Kubernetes standard API
- Kubernetes CRDs (CustomResourceDefinitions)
- Kubernetes Operators
- Kubernetes reconciliation
- Kubernetes network
- Policy engines
New concepts to explore.
- Crossplane
- CRI CNI and CSI
- Abstraction
- Platform APIs
- Infrastructure Composition
- Application Environments & Infrastructure Isolation
- Developer Portals & Service Catalogs
- Golden Paths
- Cognitive Load Reduction
- Platform as a Product
- Observability
- Feature Flags
- Progressive Delivery
- Service Mesh
- Mutual TLS (mTLS)
- Shift-Left Security & Automation
- Software Supply Chain Security & Software Bill of Materials
- Chaos Engineering
- Incident Response & Platform Resilience
- DORA Metrics
- Platform ROI & Adoption Metrics
I am structuring my study plan around a daily deep-dive into each core technology and concept.
Each upcoming post in this series will cover one specific topic. I will include relevant citations, resource links, key takeaways, and personal summaries of what I learned that day. My goal is for this series to serve as a clear roadmap; helping both myself and fellow engineers grow together in cloud-native platform engineering.
Over the coming weeks, each post will focus on a specific topic as I work through it. I will break down core concepts, share helpful documentation and citations, summarize my key takeaways, and reflect on practical applications.
My goal is to keep this journey open and transparent and creating a running reference for myself while helping fellow engineers who are also navigating the cloud-native ecosystem. Stay tuned for the first deep dive!