From Journey to Practice: AI-Powered Cloud Engineering

THE HARD PART IS NOT THE MODEL. It is everything around it.

Two thousand alerts a month for a five-person team. Motion Network, a fictional gym chain, decides to use AI to ease the load on operations, and discovers that the hard part is not the model: it is everything around it.

This course book shows how to use AI in infrastructure, automation and operations with clear limits, from the first assistant to the design of a complete operations assistant that investigates, prepares actions for approval and keeps a trail of everything.

You will learn to: choose good use cases and evaluate answers with a test set; build context and instructions without letting sensitive data leave; review suggested code, commands and infrastructure before applying them; give an agent tools with contracts, validation and minimum permissions; defend the system against prompt injection and keep human approval meaningful.

4 case studies, 20 diagrams, more than 30 labs (one on AWS, creating no resources, and five in Python on your own machine, calling no model), checklists and exercises with an answer key.

About the author: André Romão Quinhoneiro has worked in IT since 2003. He is a DevOps Engineer at Broto, where he takes care of AWS infrastructure and information security. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a graduate specialization in Cloud Computing Projects.