Why problem solving skills is important as an aspiring Cloud Engineer
Decided to drop one of my LinkedIn posts here
Today’s project reminded me that in DevOps and most tech niches in general, your stack knowledge only gets you so far. The real skill is systematic problem-solving — reading unfamiliar code, isolating root causes, and fixing issues without guesswork.
I cloned a project from GitHub as usual, Completely unfamiliar codebase. My job: containerize it.
Here’s what I encountered and how I countered it back👇
🔴 Error 1: Backend container wouldn’t start
My background is Python. This project wasn’t.
My background is Python. This project wasn’t.
Fix: Rewrote the Dockerfile from scratch to properly support a PM2 process manager inside an Alpine Linux base image.
🔴 Error 2: Frontend loaded. Backend couldn’t reach the database.
First instinct: “I misconfigured my env variables.”
Reality: I hadn’t. The source code never initialized variables using standard Postgres placeholders in the first place.
First instinct: “I misconfigured my env variables.”
Reality: I hadn’t. The source code never initialized variables using standard Postgres placeholders in the first place.
This is where developer skills meet DevOps skills — you have to read someone else’s code carefully enough to debug it safely, not just guess and restart.
✅ The result:
A fully built, secure image. Not from trial and error — from tracing every error to its actual root cause and fixing it with precision.
A fully built, secure image. Not from trial and error — from tracing every error to its actual root cause and fixing it with precision.
🔜 What’s next:
Running a Trivy scan for vulnerabilities then pushing and tagging it “hardened” to Dockerhub where it will be pulled onto my AWS EC2 server. Remember, no CI/CD automations yet just pure manual handling to understand the full concepts of containerization. I’m already expecting a break-and-rebuild cycle once I finish scanning. Documenting all of it as part of my “From GitHub to AWS” DevSecOps series.
Running a Trivy scan for vulnerabilities then pushing and tagging it “hardened” to Dockerhub where it will be pulled onto my AWS EC2 server. Remember, no CI/CD automations yet just pure manual handling to understand the full concepts of containerization. I’m already expecting a break-and-rebuild cycle once I finish scanning. Documenting all of it as part of my “From GitHub to AWS” DevSecOps series.
More posts coming as this project unfolds 🚀
#DevOps #AWS #CloudComputing #Docker
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