Introduction A few months ago, I did not know what Terraform was. I had never written a Lambda function. I could not tell you the difference between an S3 bucket policy and an IAM role. At the time, I was coming from a sales background. I had experience with cold outreach, lead generation, HubSpot certifications, and customer-facing work, but the closest I had gotten to "the cloud" was storing files on Google Drive. The turning point was my brother-in-law. He works as a DevOps engineer at Compass/Foodbuy, and one day he walked me through what his job actually looks like. He showed me the dashboards, the pipelines, the infrastructure, and how all the different pieces work together behind the scenes. I was hooked. It felt like problem-solving at scale, and it clicked with something in me that sales alone was not fully satisfying. He encouraged me to start by getting my AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification so I could build a real foundation.…