About Build Break Automate
Welcome to Build Break Automate—a blog dedicated to exploring the fascinating, frustrating, and fast-evolving world of DevOps, SRE, Cloud Engineering, and the people who make it all work.
I’m Neeraj Prem, an engineer by trade and a tinkerer by habit. Over the years, I’ve worked hands-on with cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, observability stacks, and all the glorious YAML and chaos that comes with running modern infrastructure. This blog is my space to share lessons from the trenches—honest accounts of what worked, what didn’t, and what I wish I had known sooner.
But this isn’t just a collection of how-to guides and tooling tutorials. Build Break Automate is also about the why behind the how—the stories, decisions, and trade-offs that shape real-world engineering. From implementing scalable infrastructure to debugging those delightful 2 AM alerts, I document everything with a focus on practical learning and continuous improvement. You’ll find –
- Deep dives into Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GitOps, ArgoCD, and observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki.
- Real-world workflows and architectural patterns that have helped teams ship faster and sleep better.
- Automation strategies that replace toil with trust—and duct tape with pipelines.
Beyond the code, this blog also dives into people and process management, something I’ve grown passionate about over the years. As a senior engineer and team leader, I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that scaling systems is easy compared to scaling teams. So you’ll also find insights on:
- Leading high-performing teams without micromanaging.
- Running effective sprints, retros, and stand-ups that don’t waste time.
- Planning on-call rotations, reducing incident fatigue, and building a culture of resilience.
- Coaching engineers, giving feedback, and aligning personal growth with team outcomes.
I believe that successful DevOps and SRE practices require more than great tooling—they need great communication, psychological safety, shared ownership, and empathy. In other words, reliability is as much a people problem as it is a platform problem.
Whether you’re an individual contributor sharpening your cloud chops, a tech lead balancing delivery and downtime, or a curious engineer just trying to understand why everything is on fire again—this blog is for you.
Build Break Automate is where technical depth meets leadership insights, where the shell script meets the strategy meeting, and where engineers can find both tactical takeaways and strategic perspective.
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Let’s build smart. Break things safely. Automate everything possible. And lead with clarity.