🛠️ Cloud Engineering Is a Software Job

David Beale

— 2 min read

Why the best SREs write code like devs, not sysadmins

You want to break into cloud engineering, platform, SRE, or DevOps?

Cool. Learn to code.

I don’t mean hacking together some Terraform modules you found on GitHub. I mean writing real code. Scripts, daemons, tests, CLI tools. Treating infrastructure like a software product. Because the truth is: the best infra engineers think like developers.

🧠 From Dev to Infra — Why It Matters

When I look around at the strongest platform engineers I’ve worked with — folks building production infrastructure at scale — they all have one thing in common:

They were developers first.
Or they learned to think like one.

They write clean, tested, debuggable code.
They design systems, not scripts.
They reason about performance, observability, dependency graphs, build pipelines, and rollback strategies.

They don’t just automate.
They engineer.

🧵 Infra Without Code Is Fragile Theater

Sure, you can "get by" with some CLI kung fu and a dozen copy-pasted YAMLs. But if you're managing systems that people depend on — customer-facing services, payment platforms, large-scale pipelines — that duct tape won’t cut it.

You’ll be asked to:

  • Debug distributed systems in production
  • Write operators, daemons, or lifecycle controllers
  • Build reliable CI/CD platforms
  • Orchestrate ephemeral environments
  • Implement backpressure, rate limiting, retries

None of that is point-and-click.
It’s software.

🎯 Trying to Break In? Focus on This First

If you're aiming to land a cloud/SRE role, here’s your roadmap:

  • Learn a real language (Python, Go, or Rust if you're spicy)
  • Build a CLI tool for your dotfiles or homelab
  • Automate infra deployments with CI/CD
  • Write tests for your infra-as-code (TDD with OpenTofu? Hell yes.)
  • Contribute to open source infra tooling
  • Read the source code behind tools like kubectl, helm, gh, colima, or cosign

That’s how you think like an engineer.
Not a technician.
Not a sysadmin.
A builder.

🤝 Why This Matters (and Will Keep Matter-ing)

We're heading into a world where:

  • AI writes boilerplate faster than you can blink
  • Cost pressure is killing ops roles that can’t write code
  • Developer productivity is platform-driven

If you can build tooling that devs actually use, you're not just a maintainer.
You're an enabler. A multiplier. A force behind every deploy and every feature.

That’s the job.
And it’s never been more valuable.

✊ So Yeah — Cloud Engineering Is a Software Job.

Build things.
Test them.
Refactor.
Own it.

That’s what makes a great infra engineer.

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