After years of managing cloud services in a traditional setting — manually provisioning clusters, setting up networks, managing credentials, and navigating deployment scripts — I thought I had mastered the rhythm of delivery. Dashboards, support tickets, and carefully planned change windows were the most important things in my life. It was safe, predictable, and well-organized, but it was also slow, tiring, and full of dependencies that only worked after a lot of planning and careful changes.

Then came the shift.