How to get into devops?

minit

How can someone with a Windows / Vmware sys admin background reposition to get into a junior devops role?

Thanks!

beads

Learn Java, Java script, PowerShell, Python, SQL and how to apply these technologies in a cloud environment. Long answer is that you need to develop the DEVelopment skills to go along with the infrastructure skills. It's tough to find people with these skills, particularly when they come from a strict infrastructure background.

We are looking for a very senior DevOps person as well. Problem is just identifying candidates past the first couple of basic screenings only to fall apart in the interview process. Generally, they've proven to be very skills weak.

Hard skills. Its what for breakfast!

- b/eads

minit

Hey thanks. I can learn linux, javascript and python from any number of resources. However how do I get relevant experience in these things? Many of these positions require some experience in them first.

MicroSco

@Beads - Do someone really has to know all those languages to get into DevOps? I mean what about someone who knows how to script using Python/Powershell and has good Windows/Linux skill? In short, what I am trying to ask is, for all those programming languages you mentioned, do I (or whoever) have to have developer level of skills to get into DevOps realm?

ITSec14

We call these hires unicorns. My team has been trying to fill a position which is pretty much DevOps, but either we can't find anyone with the skills needed or if we do we can't afford their asking price.

UnixGuy

As a Windows Admin, I would pick PowerShell and get as proficient as humanely possible in it! PoweShell is a game changer...then automate everything in your job....this can be all you need to make the shift. You can pick up more tools as you go.

GirlyGirl

UnixGuy wrote: »

As a Windows Admin, I would pick PowerShell and get as proficient as humanely possible in it! PoweShell is a game changer...then automate everything in your job....this can be all you need to make the shift. You can pick up more tools as you go.

When I read your post I was initially going to comment.

Then i figured I would back up my comment before I commented.

I went to indeed.com the favorite job board of Americans everywhere and inserted DevOps into the what field. I randomly selected 5 job postings offering large amounts of money and I am 0-5 with seeing PowerShell listed. I am a firm believer in giving advice if I think my life experiences, education, or certifications can change a person for the better. But, PowerShell.......

is not listed on the 5 random postings I found paying large amounts of money. We are for the money. So, whatever the job/title the end goal is to move up. Here are a few of the random postings:

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=0f4adcdb3f771aaa&tk=1c7s42m4aa4h9al0&from=serp&vjs=3

DevOps Engineer Green Card or Citizen job - Xceed Search Partners - Phoenix, AZ | Indeed.com

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=6ec1af9d2692bce1&tk=1c7s4dgqpa4hi87i&from=serp&vjs=3

I am not saying if I spent 3 hours going through the job boards I would not find powershell listed. I am just saying I was 0-5.

I would tell the original poster to look at job descriptions. Look at what organizations are asking for. That is the best advice I can give.

Good Luck.

UnixGuy

@GirlyGirl: That's odd, as in my current employer and my previous one we were actively looking for someone with PowerShell experience and the DevOps had hard time finding qualified candidate

Now my comment was to start with PowerShell as it makes sense for a Windows Admin, and from there, learning other languages will be easier as they're all very similar.

As for job searches, I just put 'powershell' on linkedin and change location to 'United States' (assuming most posters in this forum are from..), and I got [COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6)]Showing 10,616 results[/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6)]

[/COLOR]

minit

I did a devops powershell search on indeed for my area, 30 minutes outside of philly. I only got 9 results and only 2 of them were posted in the past 30 days. Bash and python appear to be preferred.

Many want dockers and ansible as well. Is it more prudent to search for a job that utilizes the cloud? I guess that's no guarantee I'd get experience in these technologies tho.

minit

*docker lol

UnixGuy

GirlyGirl is right on the money, you are better off looking at job ads. Discard my previous advice Good luck!

DoubleNNs

My answer: 1) read The Phoenix Project 2) Work on improving monitoring within your current job 3) Help steer the company towards making decisions based off of the findings from your monitoring system and automate as much of this as possible 4) Use data learned to automate even more stuff that helps out with your job. Whatever you can't automate, throughly document

You don't need to know a specific language. You don't need to know multiple languages. There's no specific tool you need to know either. But try to know as much about the general IT landscape as you can (both open and closed source) and be able to justify why certain decisions were made -- both out of necessity for the time and/or general advantages/disadvantages of going with one solution over another.

Edit: Regardless of whether you're on-prem or in public cloud, it's also good to know about Elasticity, High Availability, solutions to problems that come with scale, and general architectural/deployment patterns.

DoubleNNs

UnixGuy wrote: »

GirlyGirl is right on the money, you are better off looking at job ads. Discard my previous advice Good luck!

I actually agree with your first comment. Learning PowerShell is a GREAT 1st step for someone coming from a Windows environment and looking to get into more automation down the road. I learned bash as my first programming language because it was native to the Linux machines I was managing. All recent Windows machines have PoSh so that's perfect for automating some of the current tasks someone is doing and/or getting into more of infrastructure automation, prior to moving on to other tools/languages.

It's hard to find people who are good at automation within a Windows environment. Everyone know PowerShell exists and that they should probably learn it at some point in time, but I haven't ran across many people who actually know it very well.

Additionally, Microsoft Azure is eating up a lot of AWS' marketshare, specifically in the Enterprise sector. Azure is all PoSh based. So much so that Microsoft has opensourced PowerShell so that it can be ran from any OS to manage Azure. Enterprise jobs usually pay very well, and if this is any indication of useful skills in 2018, PowerShell definitely should pay tremendously in the right company. In fact, the last company I came from was DESPERATE for PoSh power users. The job descriptions were pretty generic, but internally all the people on the Cloud/Infrastructure automation team used PoSh -- I didn't fit in with my Python and bash scripts and rants about Golang ::shrug::.

DoubleNNs

I think the hardest part of getting into DevOps/SRE is that there are a TON Senior level positions available, but rarely do you stumble upon a junior level position. If you find one, jump on it and learn as much as you can. My only real regret in my career thus far was passing up on a job offer for a SRE position where I would have learned a TON, instead for a regular Systems Admin role that paid more.

UnixGuy

@DoubleNNS: that has been my experience as well, when I was a unix admin, I used to automate everything with Bash, then I introduced Puppet to the environment and did a lot of Configuration management, along with Cobbler but that was 5 years ago. Azure is growing and is a viable competitor to AWS. It depends on what OP wants to get into to be honest, but I know for sure that PowerShell is a very hot skill to have right now - not sure that's what the OP wants though. Definitely easier to get into for a Windows Admin.

LeBroke

I'm a unicorn but I don't have my full degree so can't work in the states

You guys wanna remote-pay money to a dirty Canadian?

minit

Stupid question what is SRE?

chmod

Powershell is good to learn scripting so as visual basic(at least you can create some useful macros in excel).

But to work as devops engineer you need to know linux, shell scripting, python, python and more python, hadoop and some SQL and java all this on top of your infrastructure knowledge. Remember to also learn python.

Imagine this:

You are working for a startup in san francisco, one of those rapidly growing tech startups, the new instagram, the new retail store or the new uber or whatever along those lines.

They are opening stores and offices everywhere, they get more and more visits/transactions on their website, they launch a new app, the app gets 500k downloads in a couple of months, they hire hundreds of new employees including engineers that require access to many apps and expand their market to LATAM and Europe.

You are required to deploy hadoop on 3 huge datacenters, create a test enviroment on premises that interacts with apps and services on the cloud, integrate with a CDN, provision 100s of employees on different systems, keep up with the exponential data growth, more and more servers, more and more premises, VPN, network nodes, integrate to a CDN, implement version control.

You need to understand and have good knowledge of the application part, you cannot longer rely only on your network/server skills only. Automate most of the task, the business cannot wait for you to change something manually or 5 by 5 or 20 by 20, you get a requirement and generate a script/workflow to quickly implement in your hundreds of server in many Datacenters across the world plus your in house/private cloud infrastructure that is running different systems/OS/services.

Just have an idea of the kind of knowledge you must have.

LeBroke

minit wrote: »

Stupid question what is SRE?

What Google calls DevOps (and has called it before DevOps as a term came to be).

Basically it's the concept of "what happens when you have a software engineer manage infrastructure." It's similar to DevOps but not necessarily equivalent. SRE is generally considered a subset of DevOps concerned with automation, service reliability, and balancing needs of development teams to deliver features vs. needs of ops to keep the platform stable.

Literally first result when you google "SRE":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_reliability_engineering

minit

Thanks for the informed replies guys.

@chmod

What you describe certainly sound daunting, not sure I'd want to start out at a startup! Lol. There is always a reason why these jobs pay well, it ain't easy.

I hope to find a way out of my cookie cutter sys admin role, and into something a bit more aligned with the future of IT. Also, just more interesting and progressive.

So it's better to pursue Powershell, or seek out junior level Linux sysadmin roles?

DoubleNNs

minit wrote: »

Stupid question what is SRE?

I think a better question is what is DevOps :

DevOps to me is more of a cultural movement. A lot of kumbuya hand-holding in a circle and soft skills. It's more about "breaking down silos," effective communication, and blameless collaboration. About making decisions based off of data rather than bureaucracy or intuition. But also about bringing value by emphasizing reliable software that can evolve rapidly. It's more of a way of teams/companies functioning together, rather than a position -- literally saying that the Development and Operations teams should work together to better understand what the other team does and understand that bottlenecks between them affect the entire team. By it's original definition, if you as an individual or a an individual team is "DevOps" you're doing it wrong.

DevOps is usually described by the acronym CAMS - Culture, Automation, Measurement, Sharing.

Conversely, SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering. It's a position/team title and I think is what most people mean nowadays when they use the term DevOps. In it's most simplistic form, it's a group of people who work together to reduce the rate of failures while also allowing a company to reliably meet a growing demand from it's customer base. It's often very automation focused. Like how it's hard to secure something that you don't understand, it's also hard to automate something you don't understand. So this is usually a senior level position where the person is strong in either automation or systems or applications and decently enough in the other 2 areas to quickly learn on the fly -- especially since they often have to use their skills in the middle of an outage/problem. And problems that crop up at Google or LinkedIn or Dropbox or Facebook or Netflix or Uber or Amazon, unfortunately are not issues you can find StackOverflow answers or (no pun intended) Google an answer for. Those large tech companies operate at such a large scale upon software that is so heavily modified that they are sometimes the first people in the world to stumble upon the issue, but have to fix it to maintain the company's bottom-line (or their jobs )


But all the above is basically useless to recruiters and/or managers. They don't understand either of the terms but know that the company down the street is doing performing 3x faster/more profitable, so they need to hire some of those OpDevs yesterday to be superman and fix all the companies problems by next quarter.


Another great question @minit - what are your goals? What exactly are your motivations for getting into DevOps? What part of it appeals to you? Are you just looking to make more money? What does DevOps mean to you?

/rant (but seriously, the answer to the questions would help give better advice)

DoubleNNs

chmod wrote: »

But to work as devops engineer you need to know linux, shell scripting, python, python and more python, hadoop and some SQL and java all this on top of your infrastructure knowledge. Remember to also learn python.

Not all companies use Linux. My last company was 90% Microsoft. The few Linux machines they did have, they could have migrated off of, but no one understood them enough to understand that they had other options ::shrug::

Distributed Computing is important. Hadoop specifically, not so much.

Python and Java as languages specifically aren't too important. Nor do you necessarily need to know multiple languages. More important is that you DO know some programming, in whatever language it is. And you know the basics of programming well enough that you can troubleshoot bad code in a language you might not have even heard before, let alone seen before or know intimately.


Not to be combative, but I think unfortunately, giving specific examples aren't good for someone trying to break into "DevOps/SRE." And those examples also aren't the most efficient for someone coming from Windows.

SMBs and Enterprise companies that run on all Windows still need automation and documentation and SMEs and infrastructure. You can run Windows Nano and Windows containers now. Microsoft Azure is eating up Cloud market share. There is still a way for existing Windows Admins to level up while leveraging their existing skillsets.

minit

@DoubleNNs

Thank you for that. I may be in danger of actually asking a useful question on here. In short, I am mid 30's working in a company that is nearly completely on prem with no cloud use in the foreseeable future. If I am to stick with this (IT) for the next 20 years, I'd like to keep with the trends, in this case cloud/hosted services. AWS, Azure, etc. It would also be fantastic to get away from hardware.

I'm sure Devops doesn't encompass the entire cloud, but I can see the sys admin jobs postings in my area are starting to read like devops/software positions. Perhaps getting into a company that utilizes the cloud would be a good start.

In any case it sounds very interesting, and I'd love to do something new. Plus, I don't want to tell my kids one day, don't be like your Dad and stay at the same job forever that I grew to hate. They are 3 so I have time, lol.

chmod

DoubleNNs wrote: »

Not all companies use Linux. My last company was 90% Microsoft. The few Linux machines they did have, they could have migrated off of, but no one understood them enough to understand that they had other options ::shrug::

Distributed Computing is important. Hadoop specifically, not so much.

Python and Java as languages specifically aren't too important. Nor do you necessarily need to know multiple languages. More important is that you DO know some programming, in whatever language it is. And you know the basics of programming well enough that you can troubleshoot bad code in a language you might not have even heard before, let alone seen before or know intimately.


Not to be combative, but I think unfortunately, giving specific examples aren't good for someone trying to break into "DevOps/SRE." And those examples also aren't the most efficient for someone coming from Windows.

SMBs and Enterprise companies that run on all Windows still need automation and documentation and SMEs and infrastructure. You can run Windows Nano and Windows containers now. Microsoft Azure is eating up Cloud market share. There is still a way for existing Windows Admins to level up while leveraging their existing skillsets.

If you read my post, i started with an example, let's imagine your work for bla bla bla, and you have bla bla bla....

Is not a definition written on stone.

The idea of devops and i tried to explain it with an example is to be able to manage, deploy you services/web/apps in usually those large, fast paced and distributed enviroments . Automation and understanding of e2e service delivery are the keyof devops.

Doesn't matter per se if you use LAMP, MEAN, .NET, Java a mix of all those or if you run it on azure, aws, electric cloud, private/public cloud with linux, unix, windows servers.

Ertaz

LeBroke wrote: »

I'm a unicorn but I don't have my full degree so can't work in the states

You guys wanna remote-pay money to a dirty Canadian?

Only if you send us stuff from Timmy's.

DatabaseHead

+1 Powershell, great start.

LeBroke

Ertaz wrote: »

Only if you send us stuff from Timmy's.

I mean I can but it's like asking a Yankee if he'd send us stuff from McDonalds

Panther

GirlyGirl wrote: »

When I read your post I was initially going to comment.

Then i figured I would back up my comment before I commented.

I went to indeed.com the favorite job board of Americans everywhere and inserted DevOps into the what field. I randomly selected 5 job postings offering large amounts of money and I am 0-5 with seeing PowerShell listed. I am a firm believer in giving advice if I think my life experiences, education, or certifications can change a person for the better. But, PowerShell.......

is not listed on the 5 random postings I found paying large amounts of money. We are for the money. So, whatever the job/title the end goal is to move up. Here are a few of the random postings:

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=0f4adcdb3f771aaa&tk=1c7s42m4aa4h9al0&from=serp&vjs=3

DevOps Engineer Green Card or Citizen job - Xceed Search Partners - Phoenix, AZ | Indeed.com

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=6ec1af9d2692bce1&tk=1c7s4dgqpa4hi87i&from=serp&vjs=3

I am not saying if I spent 3 hours going through the job boards I would not find powershell listed. I am just saying I was 0-5.

I would tell the original poster to look at job descriptions. Look at what organizations are asking for. That is the best advice I can give.

Good Luck.

I'm researching devops on techexams.

I think this was a good response; research what's out there.

The elephant in the room:
How fast does what's out there change?
You research what's out there ...
You pursue education/training accordingly.
But what's out there is changing/changed.

Ismaeljrp

ITSec14 wrote: »

We call these hires unicorns. My team has been trying to fill a position which is pretty much DevOps, but either we can't find anyone with the skills needed or if we do we can't afford their asking price.

This statement says a lot. A company that wants DevOps skills, but doesn't want to pay for it. It's nonsense when you think about it.

Panther

Ismaeljrp wrote: »

This statement says a lot. A company that wants DevOps skills, but doesn't want to pay for it. It's nonsense when you think about it.

Interesting thoughts (for prospective job seekers). I can only imagine what it'd be like once you're on the inside.

When I was job searching, one question that came up for Help Desk jobs, how many tickets did you handle/resolve daily?
I had a recruiter said their client had reps who handle 60 tickets daily.

I was impressed.
In my previous job I handle 7-10 tickets daily (but I did tier 1 and 2 support).

But in hindsight, I should have asked, what do they do, reset passwords all day?