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Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

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Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#31
post #5

Well, the best way to learn is to actually do something. Create a small service in your favourite framework. Something really small, an echo service will probably suffice. Then stop "developing" and switch on "Ops mode". Automate: - builds (build & packaging scripts) - deployments - try all 3 major approaches: - push deployment: running a command on a central server that orchestrates everything (Ansible, Salt, chef-s…

> - log collection and shipping (Splunk, Graylog)

I'll also throw my hat in for setting up (and securing, without Shield) an ELK stack here. You'll learn a lot along the way.

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#32
(In case the handle is missed, I created Ansible and I'm a little opinionated on this)

DevOps isn't really a thing, but an amalgam of things. Some people think it's about culture or something, which I think is too obvious to be a thing. In the beginning when many people were using the word lightly, most people really just used it to mean automated systems administration, which is more likely called "Operations" now. That's fine. Some people use it to mean groups of people who make ops tools to allow developers to self-deploy their own stuff. That's also fine.

Most likely what you are looking for is to learn how to do IT Operations stuff they way people are currently doing it.

Reading a lot of articles is fine, trying lots of tools is fine. Talking to people at your company that DO ops is huge. Make friends with the guys who run the build systems, do security, or anything like that for starters and they can show you lots. Plus I strangely find that ops guys are much better to go to lunch with than developers. Don't know why :)

You should read up on AWS lots, as it will likely be across your career path at some time. Try a configuration management tool (or two). Learn about monitoring systems and logfile collection/analysis systems. Do a little bit of reading on computer security. Vagrant is probably useful, but optional, though you should at least get going on a virtualized Linux box. Reading up on Immutable Systems is worthwhile. Pick up either CloudFormation or Terraform, or both if on AWS. I don't know Google as well, but it has a lot of similar things.

DevOps Days conferences can be good sometimes but often they are too cultural to get down into technical bits. But they are cheap and usually close by, so they are things.

If you have a local meetup group that can be absolutely great.

The really nice thing about AWS now is there are tons of parts and it is pretty cheap to try things out, where before you probably couldn't get your IT guy to let you play with a load balancer or get you your own database instance. Now you can, so that makes it a lot easier to learn than it was before.

IMHO I don't like books because they are often written by people who don't DO things (DevOps has an unfortunate "thought leader" problem, which impacts conferences and tries to get everyone to believe the same things), and podcasts/videos are too slow for me, and my brain is a lot more random access.

Don't get caught up in assuming you must do any one particular thing. For instance, Continuous Deployment is a spectrum, it's not appropriate for everyone.

And at most people's scale, you have no need for something like Docker or Kubernetes when basic AWS instances require a lot less to keep going in your head.

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#33
post #5

Well, the best way to learn is to actually do something. Create a small service in your favourite framework. Something really small, an echo service will probably suffice. Then stop "developing" and switch on "Ops mode". Automate: - builds (build & packaging scripts) - deployments - try all 3 major approaches: - push deployment: running a command on a central server that orchestrates everything (Ansible, Salt, chef-s…

I forgot to mention 3 very important things "to add":

- security (you should already know a great deal from your work as a developer, the general things such as no open ports, no plain text passwords, etc.)

- related to security: secret management (Chef, Puppet - I think, Vault)

- backups, backups, backups: for the database and basically anything which is not reproducible from source (which in general should only be your database data)

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#34
For the build/test/integration/deployment cycle, there's "Continuous Delivery" by Humble and Farley: https://smile.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Auto...

I found that very good for understanding the principles and reasons. Implementing it was a very frustrating experience for me, which is why I wrote a (much shorter) book on how to do it practically, with worked examples: https://leanpub.com/deploy

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#35
post #28
post #5

Well, the best way to learn is to actually do something. Create a small service in your favourite framework. Something really small, an echo service will probably suffice. Then stop "developing" and switch on "Ops mode". Automate: - builds (build & packaging scripts) - deployments - try all 3 major approaches: - push deployment: running a command on a central server that orchestrates everything (Ansible, Salt, chef-s…

Friends don't let friends configure Nagios...

How is he supposed to learn the Ops part of DevOps without pain and suffering? :D

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#36
Devops:

One word of caution. The future really will be having a docker file and finding a place to run code (docker swarm, ecs, etc). When you commit code it will be ran through a ci system (unit tested, staged) then updated.

The salts, puppets, chefs, Vaults, running your own Kubernetes (wtf), VMs, Nagios, sendmails, vpcs and all this other drama will be latin in a few years.

The future will be running the code on your macbook (with container of choice), then commiting. The end.

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#37
post #9

Also, if you can afford it, the Site Reliability Engineering book is an excellent comprehensive resource on practices, theory, return from experience: https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html (and you can read it online for free, too).

Instead of buying the book, why not get Safari (the website, not the browser) and read that book plus many more? And if you are an ACM member you already have access to it through http://learning.acm.org

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#38

Devops: One word of caution. The future really will be having a docker file and finding a place to run code (docker swarm, ecs, etc). When you commit code it will be ran through a ci system (unit tested, staged) then updated. The salts, puppets, chefs, Vaults, running your own Kubernetes (wtf), VMs, Nagios, sendmails, vpcs and all this other drama will be latin in a few years. The future will be running the code on y…

This is not particularly helpful advice. All of these things are worth learning and they are all still in widespread use and aren't going to disappear overnight. On top of that it's not like docker is some magic wand that magically makes DevOps happen. If that's the future it's not here yet and doesn't answer the OP's question.

Re: Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

#39

Devops: One word of caution. The future really will be having a docker file and finding a place to run code (docker swarm, ecs, etc). When you commit code it will be ran through a ci system (unit tested, staged) then updated. The salts, puppets, chefs, Vaults, running your own Kubernetes (wtf), VMs, Nagios, sendmails, vpcs and all this other drama will be latin in a few years. The future will be running the code on y…

This is not particularly helpful advice. All of these things are worth learning and they are all still in widespread use and aren't going to disappear overnight. On top of that it's not like docker is some magic wand that magically makes DevOps happen. If that's the future it's not here yet and doesn't answer the OP's question.

not like docker is some magic wand that magically makes DevOps happen

Exactly. So I would start studying this. Like container security, how ci works with containers, how ecs works. Instead of terrible advice like 'learn how puppet works'. Further it is helpful advice. If someone asked me how they can get involved in action script coding I would warn them too.

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