Lower the IaC learning curve

Lower the IaC & Terraform learning curve.

One of the main challenges of the IT industry in general and specifically in the cloud is the lack of engineers, especially skilled ones.

Adding to that, the fast-growing technologies, cloud services and tooling that make it even harder to cloud architect, DevOps and platform engineers to keep up.

On the other hand, the business cares about outcomes, which put more pressure on teams to deliver on time. This usually reduces the time allowed for engineers to explore & learn new solutions or improve their existing processes.

When we look closely at what is needed to build and maintain a cloud infrastructure, it becomes clear that the learning curve is high as engineers need to learn:

• Terraform, it could be easy, but it takes time to reach a good velocity
• CI/CD, the biggest part here is maintenance and how to make sure that the deployment factory is always running in good conditions
• Best practices for both Terraform & IaC. This is extremely important to be able to scale the infrastructure and secure it the right way.
• Different tools used for security, compliance, cost optimization…

For managers, the biggest question is: Do you hire new engineers who are expert on IaC or train your existing team?

• Hiring takes a few months, and once engineers hired, they need time to get up to speed.
• Training the team, is time-consuming and may decrease the velocity, even if the return is much more important.

So, how do you solve this puzzle?