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A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

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Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#31

Post by denvrede »

nubb wrote: post #11

ill never get why people punish themselves with this devops shit. you could just learn 1 thing (networking) on a few vendors (cisco, juniper, whatever), pass a few tests and be making good money out the gate. i feel like devops is just a bucket for lost souls who like tech stuff. am i crazy?

> i feel like devops is just a bucket for lost souls who like tech stuff.

Yup, that's me. I would call my self a generalist with a slight tendency towards cloud infrastructure. But I love ALL the tech!

* Let me install the newest WiFi hardware and rehaul the local network - I'm happy

* Let me dig into the newest cloud-native tools to enhance the developer experience- I'm happy

* Tell me about the small problem you have in a step of your build pipeline - I'll sink 10 days into it and optimize the whole pipeline - I'm happy

* Let me put all the infrastructure configuration into code - I'm happy

The list is endless. The / one downside is that I'm juggling priorities all the time and the backlog of things I would like to do is also - endless.

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#33

Post by scarface74 »

oneplane wrote: post #29
scarface74 wrote: post #22

Standard rant: if an individual “is doing DevOps”, then they are in “operations” and just doing what operations has done forever using a fancy name. No there was never a time in modern history (ie at least since I’ve been around in the mid 90s) that operations at any scale wasn’t using some type of tooling - either DCL for VAX machines, Perl, PowerShell, etc.

That's both true and a lie. It's true in that people can't agree on what words mean and slap them on anything, and it's a lie that it is ops/sysadmin, because it's not.

What’s the difference? Ops and sys admin has always been about automation at scale and monitoring.

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#34

Post by cbushko »

Folks tend to get so upset about the title of "DevOps". I am unsure if it is because of:

  - just dealing with bad Ops engineers at work that "don't do much"
  - employees taking advantage of the DevOps movement to make more money
  - System Administrators complaining that 'this is what we have always done'
System Administrators, though skilled, had a much different mindset in the 90s when I worked closely with them. They were more focused on keeping Sun hardware running and keeping the SAN from filling up. That server room was their 'production'. They were still on call for when a server went down and it took days for a new server to be rebuilt. The best of them wrote scripts to make their lives easier but that wasn't often the focus. They were too busy keeping the systems running to automate much of it.

I find that DevOps is a different level of abstraction compared to Sys Admins. In general, they do not need to know how to build a server and fight with the OS as they can use tooling to spin up 100s of machines in the cloud. The amount of knowledge they need is much broader and less specialized than a System Administrator. Where the Sys Admin would need to know the ins and outs of Cisco Routers, the DevOps engineer only needs to know how to use a Load Balancer. If lucky, there is a tool that makes it easy to create them.

I find the list in the guide to be quite accurate but you do not need to be a master of everything in the list.

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#35

Post by Aeolun »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #12

1. Find out that DevOps Engineer is a made up title by hiring managers to mean "IT Operations Engineer That Knows Modern Tools" but shorter 2. Become an IT Operations Engineer 3. Years later, find out what DevOps actually is 4. Never actually practice DevOps 5. Become a DevOps Consultant

Unless you are an especially forward thinking Operations Engineer, I don’t think this is necessarily true.

Most of the people I’ve worked with called like that stopped their professional development somewhere around the year 2000 and are now coasting along.

For the new title, I feel like they completely ignore the Dev part of DevOps.

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#36

Post by jmillikin »

tayo42 wrote: post #4
blown_gasket wrote: post #2

As someone that has never worked at a startup before, this seems to be the list of skills a startup might find reasonable for a 'DevOps Engineer'. Every other place I've interviewed or have worked has DevOps Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer being distinctly different roles (SRE focusing on monitoring and logging and DevOps engineer focusing on pipeline and build). There are also other places like where I am now…

devops or sre might as well be a euphemism for sysadmin that can write a little python

SRE is a software engineering position -- someone needs to write the software (such as Kubernetes) that sysadmins use. It also requires a good understanding of lower-level languages, since someone who only knows Python will have a difficult time debugging a kernel panic or weird mutex issue in multi-threaded C++.

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#37

Post by throwaway892238 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #25
throwaway892238 wrote: post #12

1. Find out that DevOps Engineer is a made up title by hiring managers to mean "IT Operations Engineer That Knows Modern Tools" but shorter 2. Become an IT Operations Engineer 3. Years later, find out what DevOps actually is 4. Never actually practice DevOps 5. Become a DevOps Consultant

IT operations engineer? How about sysadmin?

Yeah, pretty similar. The difference would be that a Systems Administrator mainly "Administrates" (maintenance, toil, etc), which doesn't have to involve an Engineering discipline. An IT Operations Engineer would take on more Engineering work and not necessarily "Administrate". And the "Operations" part can relate to either Business Operations or Operations Management.

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#38

Post by combyn8tor »

nubb wrote: post #11

ill never get why people punish themselves with this devops shit. you could just learn 1 thing (networking) on a few vendors (cisco, juniper, whatever), pass a few tests and be making good money out the gate. i feel like devops is just a bucket for lost souls who like tech stuff. am i crazy?

> just learn 1 thing (networking) on a few vendors (cisco, juniper, whatever)

Sure, if you're only motivation is money. To a lot of folks that sounds miserable.

> i feel like devops is just a bucket for lost souls who like tech stuff.

I don't understand...do you not like "tech stuff"? We're posting on hackernews here...

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#39

Post by throwaway892238 »

donutshop wrote: post #14

1. Identify a plethora of tools that are gaining steam 2. Start implementing tools into existing workflows 3. Pad resume with new buzz words 4. Leave for a more lucrative gig while midflight with current projects 5. Rinse and repeat

Can I give you all my upvotes?

Re: A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer

#40

Post by ms4720 »

gtirloni wrote: post #8
daenney wrote: post #5

12. Learn DevOps What is Scrum? Ways To Learn About Scrum Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Phases & Models The Beginner's Guide to Agile in Jira: Course description Learn SAFe Learn Automation Testing Well. That list is certainly something. But whatever it is, it's not DevOps. It's like "certified agile"? Which is also not agile.

To be fair, that's the last bullet point after all the other (pretty relevant) topics. And I agree, that's "certified agile". Pretty useless. You can pick whatever "agile" processes are being done in your company in 15min and just go with the flow. A "devops engineer" (whatever that is) hardly needs to know more than that to deliver.

"certified agile" makes me think of gymnasts
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