Coming from a VFX and IT background, I decided to transition into DevOps. This is the first post in a series documenting that journey.

Why Fedora?

Fedora aligns well with enterprise DevOps — the same package manager (DNF), SELinux by default, and close ties to RHEL. The quirks you solve on Fedora build exactly the troubleshooting mindset DevOps engineers need.

Toolbox for Isolation

Rather than installing everything directly on the host, I use Toolbox — a container-based environment built on Podman. My DevOps tools live in a container called sandbox, keeping the host clean.

toolbox create --container sandbox
toolbox enter sandbox

Tools Installed Inside the Container

Tool Purpose
Terraform Infrastructure as Code
AWS CLI AWS service management
AWS SAM CLI Serverless app deployment
Python 3 Scripting
Git Version control
VS Code Editor (installed via RPM) 
# Terraform
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/fedora/hashicorp.repo
sudo dnf install terraform -y

# AWS CLI
curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip
sudo ./aws/install

aws configure

Flatpak for GUI Apps

GUI apps like Chrome and Thunderbird run as Flatpaks on the host — sandboxed from the container environment.

flatpak install flathub com.google.Chrome
flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.Thunderbird

One gotcha — Flatpak apps are sandboxed and can’t see host commands like toolbox. Worth knowing early.

What’s Next

With the environment ready, the next step was writing actual Terraform code and deploying infrastructure to AWS.