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Ask HN: Switching Career from Full Stack to DevOps full time

3 points by haidrali ↗ HN
Hello

I am a full stack developer working with ruby, js, postgres, redis on application development mainly. I am looking into switching my career to DevOps. Currently I have involve into requirement analysis, UI/UX, development, testing and production things but now thinking of exploring DevOps more & more Any suggestion of prior such experience share would be highly thankful

5 comments

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nillawafer
When researching this topic myself, I have found volumes of wonderful insight in the Google Site Reliability Engineering book, available to read free online at: https://landing.google.com/sre/book/index.html
haidrali
Yes I have head of this book, can you draw what Site Reliability Engineer has common with DevOps engineer ?
techjuice
You should only go into the DevOps world after you have also gained systems engineering experience too which is the Ops part of DevOps. This would involve the capability to setup from scratch a Linux, Unix and or Windows server which would include securing and setting up the security, web, database, mail, and networking services (IIS, Apache, NGINX, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, MariaDB, Exchange, Sharepoint, sendmail, postfix, etc.) in a secure manner remotely using only SSH and or PowerShell depending on the environment you are in.

You would also be expected to be able to setup disaster recovery COOP (continuity of operations plan) and backup setups for the site along with testing and executing them on a regular basis if the site requires it. You should also have a very good understanding of virtualization technology (VMWare, Xen, AWS, Google Cloud, Citrix, KVM) and orchestration technology (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, VMWare Orchestrator, etc.) Basically you are also expected to be at least an intermediate level systems engineer with experience in systems automation that can also do secure software engineering.

It is not hard if you have been doing both for 5+ years, but will take some time especially if you have never had a full-time job as a systems engineer building and tearing down information systems from scratch for local private and public internet facing systems, along with automating. If you have had experience as a full time systems engineer I would say go ahead as it would compliment your software engineering experience of web applications along with the testing that you have done to make a pretty good DevOps Engineer.

haidrali
Thank you for reply, you comment really is really helpful, Yes I have been setting production environment for doing production but never had full time system engineering position. I have very good grasp over linux file system, security(intermediate level),Inter process communication, VIM and utilities like grep, HTOP, ps aux etc, . What do you think of linux academy (https://linuxacademy.com/) should I start taking courses from here ?

Thanks

techjuice
The more you train for and learn the better, I would also recommend looking into the Linux Foundation - https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification and the very well known Linux Certifications from Redhat - https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification since they are performance based and you cannot pass them without actually being able to do the work.

If you want to add a few more in demand skill sets to the mix I would also recommend getting at least a CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) and possibly a CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional) certification so you will also be very sufficient in understanding and configuring routers and switches for LANs and WANs. These would help when determining how to scale your website, if you ever end up managing a colocation setup or have to get hands on with the hardware as there is normally not a separate network engineer on site unless the customer has a very large budget to pay for both system engineers and network engineers.