About Me
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My name is Neil Podoba. I’m a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer and Amazon Dedicated Cloud Engineer supporting AWS Public Sector and Department of Defense environments. I hold an adjudicated TS/SCI-FS Polygraph clearance and have spent the last 8 years building, securing, and automating mission-critical infrastructure across military, federal, and cloud environments.

This blog is strictly my homelab consisting of a physical 4-node Raspberry Pi cluster where I build, break, and document everything I’m learning outside of work.

Professional Journey
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My career started in the US Army National Guard as a 25N Nodal Networking Specialist, where I built and secured enterprise-grade tactical networks for 200+ users across multiple brigade units. That foundation in physical networking and security drove everything that came after.

From there I transitioned into federal cybersecurity engineering, spending years at Forcepoint and Everfox building Kubernetes environments, automating counterintelligence workflows, and maintaining infrastructure for classified government programs. I then moved into my current role at AWS, where I work directly inside isolated, air-gapped cloud partitions supporting sovereign cloud requirements for the Department of Defense.

I currently also serve as a 1D7X1 Cyber Defense Operations specialist in the Air Force National Guard, executing real-time threat hunting and incident response for mission-critical networks.

Throughout my career I’ve built hands-on experience with: