The DevOps Engineer thread

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

Soldato
Joined
18 May 2010
Posts
23,801
Location
London
Thought I'd make a DevOps engineering thread to discuss any topics related to our field.

I will start off with a question, does any one know any good material to learn Crossplane?

The only thing I have found is a book.
 
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I recently applied for a DevOps Engineer role. I have over 12 years of experience as a software developer and thought it would be an interesting, relevant, but slightly different role. My application was turned down due to never actually holding the title 'DevOps Engineer'. However, I've managed the full stack of web development for 10+ years (coding practices, CI, releases, hosting, server management, etc.), but they simply ignored this and didn't give me a second look (they basically told me that when I asked).

Am I not really understanding what's truly involved in a DevOps Engineer role? Maybe I am underestimating what you guys do. No offence intended, I am genuinely interested in the role! :)
 
Craig321 said:
I recently applied for a DevOps Engineer role. I have over 12 years of experience as a software developer and thought it would be an interesting, relevant, but slightly different role. My application was turned down due to never actually holding the title 'DevOps Engineer'. However, I've managed the full stack of web development for 10+ years (coding practices, CI, releases, hosting, server management, etc.), but they simply ignored this and didn't give me a second look (they basically told me that when I asked).

Am I not really understanding what's truly involved in a DevOps Engineer role? Maybe I am underestimating what you guys do. No offence intended, I am genuinely interested in the role! :)
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I wouldn't be too disheartened by being turned down by one company there are plenty of opportunities out there.

From my experiences a DevOps is usually from an system engineering background. So sometimes at work when we have to get developers to do "Devops" they think like a software engineer not like a systems/infrastructure engineer so although what they might produce is functionally correct it is not along the same lines of thought as someone with more of a systems/infrastructure background.

For example us systems/infrastructure engineers tend to centralise whilst developers tend to want to decouple.

I also find that developers lack networking theory.

On the flip side I think software developers can teach us DevOps a lot about designing proper ci/cd pipelines etc.
 
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I think a lot of companies don't understand what DevOps is and it's become the new buzz word since 2019 because of the push to Cloud technologies.

I had interview last year for an System Engineer, spent 2 hours looking at how everything was automated through code.... I was like "this not an System engineer role, mainly devops"
 
Ok let's talk Python Vs Go.

A few years ago I picked up Python as my programming language of choice to learn as a DevOps.

Hower the general theme on the internet is that as a DevOps it is better putting time and energy in to learning Go instead as it's more modern and a lot of the tools we use these days are actually built with Go.

What do you think?
 
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Craig321 said:
I recently applied for a DevOps Engineer role. I have over 12 years of experience as a software developer and thought it would be an interesting, relevant, but slightly different role. My application was turned down due to never actually holding the title 'DevOps Engineer'. However, I've managed the full stack of web development for 10+ years (coding practices, CI, releases, hosting, server management, etc.), but they simply ignored this and didn't give me a second look (they basically told me that when I asked).

Am I not really understanding what's truly involved in a DevOps Engineer role? Maybe I am underestimating what you guys do. No offence intended, I am genuinely interested in the role! :)
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Applying for a job is more of a game to get a face to face interview; ideally you need to tailor your CV to get passed the filtering stages of the process. Some of the software used and or people at this stage won't fully understand what they are dealing with. I would just rewrite the job title for part of your history to be more focused on some of the tasks you had experience with. If asked you can explain face to face what your skills are while being a developer or engineer. It's a tough market right now so more power is with recruiters than candidates for a lot of roles, they can be filtering out hundreds of apps for a single job.
 
I’m an IT Manager with a team of software engineers, for context.

I don’t think DevOps is a useful title as it’s ambiguous at best, although I have my own interpretation- as do most people, which really is the problem. Not dissimilar to agile (or Agile as the consultancies will sell to you).

I would assume it means:

- You can develop software in at least one primary language or specialty.
- You may have multiple contexts under your belt and refer to yourself as ‘full stack’, such as web, UI and HTTP APIs and database (maybe).
- You know how to manage integration and deployment, probably CI (but that term is also used loosely I’ve found).
- You probably have some experience of test automation (needed for the CI really).
- You probably have some experience with managing infrastructure and basic networking requirements, possibly only in cloud infrastructure nowadays as it’s so accessible.
- You have worked in a team where you have responsibility to respond and deal with production/operational incidents, maybe even facing off to customers directly or indirectly.

So overall I would assume you had broad experience across the discipline and maybe weren’t an expert in any one area but could manage most tasks an engineer could be asked to perform.

That said, I’ve seen DevOps engineers being described as literally just a person that babysits a Continuous Integration pipeline and doesn’t develop anything. I’ve also seen people who could manage just about any aspect of an applications lifecycle (often through experience at small companies or startups) who just describe themselves as a ‘developer’.

Things I’d like to see ideally in the role would be:

- Development experience in front and back end contexts.
- Test-driven development focus with strong automation skills.
- Worked in true CI/CD environment (i.e. multiple production deployments per day).
- Knowledge of complete deployment pipeline.
- Worked with at least one cloud platform.
- Worked in a team that manages their own uptime, logs, production incidents, certs/credentials, analytics etc.

Then I would consider that a true DevOps engineer role, in an ideal world. Probably not realistic or at least expensive.
 
What IDE are people using?

I still do everything through vim.

Just watching this video. Neovim could be a good tool to migrate too. Might take a little bit of time to learn the commands though.


 
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I always though DevOps was more infrastructure than development but requiring development skills to support development infrastructure and deployments.

We have one Database admin who is DevOps and I support them, but in reality I spend more time on development support with occasional deployments but I don't really have skillset or the interest in it. We don't do much coding for DevOps. We simply aren't big enough. We have developers who support their deployments but it's all relatively manual. Probably because we are too small and there isn't strong management to standardise on stuff. Also DevOps exists to ring fence security around who can do what. All seems very ad hoc to me. Though the guys are experts they just don't like standardise.
 
OspreyO said:
I always though DevOps was more infrastructure than development but requiring development skills to support development infrastructure and deployments.
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I would say it's basically IT guys who can code, so not only can they deal with the day to day IT, but they are capable of coding on the systems to refine them, and also produce totally new functionality and take on custom new projects from scratch.
 
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Craig321 said:
However, I've managed the full stack of web development for 10+ years (coding practices, CI, releases, hosting, server management, etc.), but they simply ignored this and didn't give me a second look (they basically told me that when I asked).

Am I not really understanding what's truly involved in a DevOps Engineer role?
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It's a bit blinkered of them if, with context, you've got all that experience. But also isn't it a bit of a step down for you? Like you've got the full stack background and you're looking at an operations role? Unless you're going to manage an operations team or something then it doesn't seem like a good career move.

OspreyO said:
I always though DevOps was more infrastructure than development but requiring development skills to support development infrastructure and deployments.
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The thing is the "but requiring development skills" isn't really much of a "but", it basically *is* still IT operations just slightly rebranded. Maybe they're more often writing Python scripts instead of Perl scripts and dealing with AWS, Azure etc.. instead of servers in data centers but good ops people have often had some coding skills in the past.

Originally it was a philosophy/methodology or set of practices to make development and operations work more seamlessly together... but now it's also used to refer to a role/job title, what would have been IT operations is now "DevOps", an IT operations Analysis = "DevOps Engineer" etc.. but it's very much the "Ops" part and not the "Dev".
 
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OspreyO said:
Coding things to do what....? Other than automate deployments etc..
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It's a term used to cover many different roles and tech stacks, and the coding tasks will be equally varied, but generally it's stuff that the business needs and that they think the DevOps guys can do. A lot of it will be applying the logic capabilities of tech solutions, e.g. those available in Azure. It's smaller quicker tasks than a developer would do, using the pre-available capabilities I would say.
 
We right code, but yes generally its infrastructure stuff like Kubernetes and Cloud.

Obviously pipelines are important too, but developers write pipeline as well.

A DevOps is basically a developer with a background in SysOps.
 
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This is a really interesting thread for me to see - I am a recruiter who often looks for DevOps Engineers and its nice to read the descriptions you guys have put through, it will definitely help my knowledge when speaking with people.
 
My take is cloud sys admin that can do a bit of tool development in usually python or go but thats a huge oversimplification.
 
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