Moving from Systems Engineer to Cloud Engineer/DevOps?

blargoe

Anyone else out there considering investing their time and resources into making this transition? Being an outstanding systems engineer with a diverse skill set is not what it once was. This is the first time in my career that I do not feel that I can walk off my job and find something at least equivalent in pay, title, and benefits in relatively short order.

I think I have the aptitude and background to excel in a role like this with some self-study, but juggling family with training/study during my personal time is going to be extremely challenging for me. I haven't worked with a real programming language to speak of since college, though I do have a knack for scripting and automation so I don't think picking up Python for example would be hard for me. Getting OTJ with actual production IaaS/PaaS workload where I am going to struggle, current company has been and probably will continue to be vehemently anti-cloud.

UnixGuy

@Blargoe: I feel the exact same way...I took a job 6 months ago in security and I'm trying to make the transition...I honestly have no desire in re-training again in cloud tech, salaries seem lower and there are new tools every 6 months. Service Providers are a good place if you want to re-skill. It's actually easier than what you think, you'll pick it up soon. But it's frustrating like you said, it's not what it used to be..

NightShade03

I don't actually think you need to have a company that is leveraging cloud in order to leverage DevOps or similar principles. For example, if you are doing server builds or network configs...those can all be automated. For the servers you have bare metal bootstrapping with something like kickstart and then provisioning with a Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc. Similarly with the network side you have a ton of SDN controllers and APIs to work with for provisioning and automated configs. Python is definitely helpful here or every ruby, but the key point is that learning those skills and working with those technologies doesn't involve cloud at all.

Now if you were to get a new job, yes you might have a handicap when it comes to not knowing "AWS", but all the skills you do know would transfer nicely and the cloud part you can learn on the fly. I work with a ton of orgs that are really against cloud, but they still want to innovate. Networking, security, application development...all contribute to that innovation in some form or another even if cloud isn't a thing within your org.

Bottom line, always try to improve your day to day functions/roles and automate them to a point where you are no longer needed. Yes that sounds dangerous, but it is the best way to learn (in my opinion) and it helps you show value.