From server room to cloud platform: a conversation with Adam
Adam spent eight years looking after on-prem servers. Today he builds the cloud platform for a bank’s payment teams. We talked about how he made the jump.
Matúš DurčiakTech recruiter · Banking & Cloud
This is part of a series where I talk to people I’ve helped take the next step in their careers.
When I first spoke to Adam, he was sure he’d “missed the cloud train”. Eight years as a Linux and VMware administrator, a lot of night shifts, and a feeling that his experience no longer counted. Three months later he signed an offer as a Cloud Platform Engineer at a large bank in Bratislava.
We sat down for a coffee to look back.
Adam, why did you want to change?
“Honestly, I was bored and a bit scared. Everything around me was moving to Azure and Kubernetes, and I was still patching the same servers. I’d done a few courses at home, but I didn’t think anyone would hire me for a cloud role without ‘real’ cloud experience.”
What changed your mind?
“Our first call. Matúš asked me about the things I’d actually done: the migration from physical servers to VMware, the backup system I automated with Ansible, the outage where the storage failed. He kept saying ‘that’s exactly what platform teams need’. Nobody had ever translated my experience like that.”
Recruiters had always asked me if I had Kubernetes. He was the first one who asked me what I’d done when production broke.
How did you prepare for the interviews?
“We picked three stories and I practised telling them properly: what happened, what I did, what I’d do differently. I also built a small Terraform and AKS project at home so I could show I was serious. In the technical interview they spent more time on my incident story than on the home lab.”
What surprised you most in the new job?
“How much my old skills matter. Networking, DNS, Linux internals, knowing how things fail. Half of the cloud problems we debug are still those. The tooling is new, the fundamentals aren’t.”
What would you tell someone in your old position?
“Stop thinking you’re behind. If you’ve kept real systems running, you already have the hardest part. Learn the tools, but talk about your experience with confidence.”
Thank you, Adam, for sharing your story. If you’re where Adam was a year ago, let’s talk. Your experience might be worth more than you think.