Like a lot of small companies out there, our infra team was scrambling with 1-2 devs clicking around cloud consoles, manually editing yamls, sevs left and right etc. we were bottlenecked for a while.
I feel lucky that we grew really fast but I was only a few years out of college and we couldn't find enough senior/staff hires to solve everything for us at the time. We hit a certain point where we had to do something different so we adopted Pulumi for IaC, and we've automated almost all of our infra processes since.
It's been a wild ride and I wanted to write and share this to hopefully help any other infra teams (esp early/mid career devs) facing the same problem. This is just a high-level overview first but if anyone has questions I'll stick around and I'm also down to write a follow-up if anyone's interested!