Looking For Alternate IT roles
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DevOps is a culture, not really a role. If you're in a DevOps environment and you're sporting the DevOps Engineer title you're more than likely wearing a lot of hats and interfacing with multiple product teams.
DevOps Engineer
Site Reliability Engineer
Cloud Engineer
System EngineerA lot of the above titles have a lot of similar duties.
If you are looking at moving into a more modern role working for a shop that has a DevOps culture I'd focus on the following:
- Cloud Native solutions for AWS / Azure / GCP
- Linux (RHCE curriculum)
- Containerization (12 factor, Docker, K8s, maybe ECS if you're doing a lot of work with AWS )
- Understand the difference between containerization and serverless, what tools/platforms are associated with each.
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform)
- Configuration Management Systems (Ansible, Chef, maybe Puppet) -- A lot of my more recent work has been gravitating away from configuration management, but I would still recommend understanding the basics of each and how they are used.
- Understand Microservices
- Learn Python
- SDLC, Software Testing, and CI/CD tools
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@jmoore said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
So I just need a plan then . I was thinking to just keep learning and get certifications about Microsoft stuff(mcsa), storage, VoIP, Linux of course, virtualization, and probably databases too. Does that sound like a good plan?
No it doesn't. It sounds like a shotgun approach. You need to pick a general area of expertise and specialize in it. Being an IT generalist is fine, but if you want more $$ you need to specialize.
Cloud is really the go to field right now. I know of several fortune 100 companies that are trying to go fully cloud in the next 4-6 years. Cloud is also great because you actually have to learn all the stuff you listed (except VOIP).
Yeah picking will be hard. Also I didn't mean to generalize forever, just until I had a reason to specialize. Just trying not to pidgeon hole myself you know.
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps is a culture, not really a role. If you're in a DevOps environment and you're sporting the DevOps Engineer title you're more than likely wearing a lot of hats and interfacing with multiple product teams.
Good post, but I'd rephrase this to say more like "DevOps is a role made up of more hats than one."
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Also, a modern "DevOps" Engineer is more of a Software Engineer role than a cross between SysAdmin and Systems Engineer.
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps = Cross between IT admin and Engineer. It is almost solely scripting and command line based, which makes it awesome IMO.
Devops is something I have my eye on
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
Also, a modern "DevOps" Engineer is more of a Software Engineer role than a cross between SysAdmin and Systems Engineer.
I do DevOps, and I literally do zero SOftware Engineering. Mostly PowerShell, some Python. I don't need to know any programming languages. Sure, you can also do DevOps AND programming... you can be a programmer gone DevOps and CI/CD your software. Or, you can do DevOps to bridge IT Systems Engineering, Administration, and Operations.
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps = Cross between IT admin and Engineer. It is almost solely scripting and command line based, which makes it awesome IMO.
Yeah, DevOps makes it almost impossible to keep your hats separate because you kind of role the two together.
Also DevOps roles never deal with users. Some people may or may not like that
Yeah I've primarily dealt with users for the last 5 years so it wouldn't hurt my feelings to do otherwise
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@Obsolesce If you're doing DevOps and you're not engineering software, aren't you just doing Ops then?
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@RamblingBiped thanks, that's a lot of good info. I've read about many if those topics before and a few are on my radar like ansible and AWS technologies. Learning python currently and it's interesting for sure.
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I would suspect you're writing software @Obsolesce . I am constantly engineering automation and tooling for facilitating the build, test, deployment, and reliabilty of software. Whether that is writing a Lambda, creating a Step Function State Machine, or rearchitecting an existing workload for the Cloud.
It's all code, and it is all stored in a source repository, and developed using the same principles and engineering practice that would go into developing any other application/piece of software.
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@Obsolesce If you're doing DevOps and you're not engineering software, aren't you just doing Ops then?
Literally zero software engineering, zero software programming. I am currently spending a lot of time in Azure DevOps, as well as Azure Automation and other Azure serverless technologies.
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A pure devops engineer job is infrastructure as code pretty much. It has nothing to do with developing software.
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
I would suspect you're writing software @Obsolesce . I am constantly engineering automation and tooling for facilitating the build, test, deployment, and reliabilty of software. Whether that is writing a Lambda, creating a Step Function State Machine, or rearchitecting an existing workload for the Cloud.
It's all code, and it is all stored in a source repository, and developed using the same principles and engineering practice that would go into developing any other application/piece of software.
Yeah thats not software, its called infrastructure as code.
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Just because you use git doesnt make you a developer lol.
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Companies may ask you to wear multiple hats, but everything else is outside the devops role.
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
I would suspect you're writing software @Obsolesce . I am constantly engineering automation and tooling for facilitating the build, test, deployment, and reliabilty of software. Whether that is writing a Lambda, creating a Step Function State Machine, or rearchitecting an existing workload for the Cloud.
It's all code, and it is all stored in a source repository, and developed using the same principles and engineering practice that would go into developing any other application/piece of software.
No, I'm not writing any software. I'm not writing any applications.
@Obsolesce said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@Obsolesce If you're doing DevOps and you're not engineering software, aren't you just doing Ops then?
edit:
Literally zero software engineering, zero software programming. I am currently spending a lot of time in Azure DevOps, as well as Azure Automation and other Azure serverless technologies. I really like Azure Functions a lot and have quite a bit in there. I started moving a lot of Azure Automation scripts to Functions with a lot of better than expected results. -
So using python to architect and write a serverless application doesn't count as software engineering? Developing, testing, and deploying custom resources for CloudFormation doesn't count as Software Engineering?
^That work literally follows the same steps and workflow as developing a microservice.
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
So using python to architect and write a serverless application doesn't count as software engineering? Developing, testing, and deploying custom resources for CloudFormation doesn't count as Software Engineering?
^That work literally follows the same steps and workflow as developing a microservice.
Nope
That is again infrastructure as code. Python is used by damn near every Linux admin
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
So using python to architect and write a serverless application
Define application?
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Cloudformation is just a json files. Nearly every system admin deals with json files
