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📚 From PDF Overload to AI Clarity: Building an AI RAG Assistant

Introduction

If you’ve ever tried to dig a single obscure fact out of a massive technical manual, you’ll know the frustration 😩: you know it’s in there somewhere, you just can’t remember the exact wording, cmdlet name, or property that will get you there.

For me, this pain point came from Office 365 for IT Pros — a constantly updated, encyclopaedic PDF covering Microsoft cloud administration. It’s a superb resource… but not exactly quick to search when you can’t remember the magic keyword.
Often I know exactly what I want to achieve — say, add copies of sent emails to the sender’s mailbox when using a shared mailbox — but I can’t quite recall the right cmdlet or property to Ctrl+F my way to the answer.

That’s when I thought: what if I could take this PDF (and others in my archive), drop them into a centralised app, and use AI as the conductor and translator 🎼🤖 to retrieve the exact piece of information I need — just by asking naturally in plain English.

This project also doubled as a test bed for Claude Code, which I’d been using since recently completing a GenAI Bootcamp 🚀.
I wanted to see how it fared when building something from scratch in an IDE, rather than in a chat window.

👉 In this post, I’ll give a very high level overview of the four iterations (v1–v4) - what worked, what failed, and what I learned along the way.

🔥 Vibe Coding My Way to AI Connected Infra: Claude, Terraform & Cloud-Native Monitoring

📖 TL;DR – What This Post Covers

  • How I used AI tools to build an Azure-based monitoring solution from scratch
  • Lessons learned from developing two full versions (manual vs. Terraform)
  • The good, bad, and wandering of GenAI for infrastructure engineers
  • A working, cost-effective, and fully redeployable AI monitoring stack

Introduction

This project began, as many of mine do, with a career planning conversation. During a discussion with ChatGPT about professional development and emerging skill areas for 2025, one suggestion stuck with me:

"You should become an Infrastructure AI Integration Engineer."

It’s a role that doesn’t really exist yet — but probably should.

What followed was a journey to explore whether such a role could be real. I set out to build an AI-powered infrastructure monitoring solution in Azure, without any formal development background and using nothing but conversations with Claude. This wasn’t just about building something cool — it was about testing whether a seasoned infra engineer could:

  • Use GenAI to design and deploy a full solution
  • Embrace the unknown and lean into the chaos of LLM-based workflows

Cloud Resume Challenge with Terraform: Final Reflections & Future Directions 🎯

Journey Complete: What We've Built 🏗️

Over the course of this blog series, we've successfully completed the Cloud Resume Challenge using Terraform as our infrastructure-as-code tool. Let's recap what we've accomplished:

  1. Set up our development environment with Terraform and AWS credentials
  2. Deployed a static website using S3, CloudFront, Route 53, and ACM
  3. Built a serverless backend API with API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB
  4. Implemented CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for automated deployments
  5. Added security enhancements like OIDC authentication and least-privilege IAM policies

The final architecture we've created looks like this:

Basic Project Diagram

The most valuable aspect of this project is that we've built a completely automated, production-quality cloud solution. Every component is defined as code, enabling us to track changes, rollback if needed, and redeploy the entire infrastructure with minimal effort.

Cloud Resume Challenge with Terraform: Introduction & Setup 🚀

Introduction 🌍

The Cloud Resume Challenge is a hands-on project designed to build a real-world cloud application while showcasing your skills in AWS, serverless architecture, and automation. Many implementations of this challenge use AWS SAM or manual setup via the AWS console, but in this series, I will demonstrate how to build the entire infrastructure using Terraform. 💡

My Journey to Terraform 🧰

When I first discovered the Cloud Resume Challenge, I was immediately intrigued by the hands-on approach to learning cloud technologies. Having some experience with traditional IT but wanting to transition to a more cloud-focused role, I saw this challenge as the perfect opportunity to showcase my skills.

I chose Terraform over AWS SAM or CloudFormation because:

  1. Multi-cloud flexibility - While this challenge focuses on AWS, Terraform skills transfer to Azure, GCP, and other providers
  2. Declarative approach - I find the HCL syntax more intuitive than YAML for defining infrastructure
  3. Industry adoption - In my research, I found that Terraform was highly sought after in job postings
  4. Strong community - The extensive module registry and community support made learning easier

This series reflects my personal journey through the challenge, including the obstacles I overcame and the lessons I learned along the way.

  • in DevOps
  • 14 min read

GitOps Project: Automating AWS Infrastructure Deployment with Terraform and GitHub Actions

Overview

As infrastructure becomes more complex, ensuring automation, security, and compliance is crucial. This blog post walks through setting up a GitOps pipeline that simplifies AWS infrastructure management using Terraform and GitHub Actions. Whether you're an engineer looking to automate deployments or a security-conscious DevOps professional, this guide provides a structured approach to implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices.

This blog post documents my experience with the MoreThanCertified GitOps Minicamp, where students set up a fully automated GitOps pipeline to manage AWS infrastructure using Terraform and GitHub Actions. The goal is to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices, enforce security policies, and automate infrastructure deployment.

This tutorial is meant as an overview "at-a-glance" summary of the steps I took to implement the pipeline from project start, to resource deployment. The MoreThanCertified GitOps Minicamp goes into a lot more detail and covers all the topics in this post in more depth. I would highly recommend checking the course out if you haven't already.

Copyright © 2026 Matthew Pollock