Most DevOps portfolio projects follow the same pattern: deploy a "hello world" app to Kubernetes, write a README, call it done.
This isn't that.
I took the Spring PetClinic microservices — a real Java application with 7 independent services, service discovery, an API gateway, and distributed tracing — and built the entire platform around it on AWS. Infrastructure as code, a proper GitOps delivery pipeline, autoscaling at two layers, end-to-end observability, and a reproducible lifecycle that provisions or destroys the whole environment with a single command.
The live app is running right now at petclinic.ralphnetwork.online.
This post is a walkthrough of what I built, how I made the decisions I made, and — most importantly — what broke and why. Because that last part is what actually teaches you something.
