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Ask HN: How did you get into DevOps / Infra / SRE?

10 points by emschwartz ↗ HN
If you're someone who works as a devops, infrastructure, or site reliability engineer, how did you get into the field?

What got you interested and at what point in your career did it happen?

15 comments

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r00t4ccess
Working in IT for 18 years it was a somewhat natural progression, what got me interested was companies were paying 3x my salary for the same work with the new buzz word titles.
markus_zhang
Anyone jumped into a position from something parallel, such as data engineer or other swe? How did you make the jump?
speedgoose
I enjoyed devops as a teenager so I studied IT and got hired to do devops professionally.
freelanddev
I am a full stack software engineer, and a project required me to set up a CI/CD pipeline for a project (along with other infrastructure such as package hosting, automated testing, builds, deployments, etc). I'm not a DevOps engineer by title, but I maintain the build pipeline along with other application development tasks.

So, I guess my response would be, "out of need"! :)

hitsurume
As someone in DevOps, the cool thing about the field is that people come from different skillsets. You can be a developer that works at a startup that needed to learn how to support your applications and become proficient in infrastructure and SRE. You can come from IT/Sys Admin and get teamed up with developers providing them Ci/CD pipelines and platforms. You can come from the Cloud world and expand your cloud skills into DevOps. Like being a developer, at the end of the day its solving problems and painpoints. Being on-call and waking up at 3AM because of an application going down, you learn and are motivated very quickly in figuring out how not to have that happen ever again.
hnthrowaway0328
Just curious, do you expect people from other background to have non-trivial knowledge of Linux admin? The problem is, for sure I can 1) study for a Linux exam or 2) setup a server in homelab, but for 1) most likely I'd forget about most of the knowledge in 1-6 months, and 2) most likely I don't need any advanced knowledge.

Does it eventually fall to whether I have the right connection? Anyway I'm trying to apply with some basic Linux knowledge (it's one of my daily OS), so far without any luck.

hitsurume
The hardest thing about developing linux skills is having consistent exposure. At a work setting its a lot easier because you are hosting applications that people will use. So people will notice if the application stops working, and its someone job to figure out why. The application might have crashed, the disk might be full, the network might be down. As you troubleshoot issues you gain experience and you remember more. The closest thing to at home is running something like a plex server or even your own ftp/dropbox clone. Something where other people will use it, which ofrces you to make sure its always running, needs to be updated because of OS updates or app updates, and possibly needing to expand it.
yuppie_scum
Natural progression from old school Sysadmin, especially helped that I had a CS degree. I would really say the early “DevOps” was just “hard working sysadmin who doesn’t mind learning the cloud” though, and that has progressed to more SRE type work
abbadadda
Not simply but don’t want to dox myself
danwee
I would love to work as an Infra engineer. The biggest downside is that then you have to be on-call. I couldn't hate more being on-call. As a regular software engineer I hate being on-call for "normal" issues (e.g., a bug in our product breaks production on a saturday morning)... but being on-call for infrastructure issues (e.g., disk full, data corruption in db, dns problems, our aws region is down, etc.) must be the most miserable thing in the software industry.
red-iron-pine
Did signals stuff in the military.

Got out, had a couple of false starts with gub'mnt contractors, not really my jam.

Bumped into a guy running data centers, became a data center network jockey, and then into linux sysadmin work, and then into cloud.

building microservices now, neat stuff.

mr_o47
I worked as a DevOps Consultant for AWS.

To get into DevOps here’s what you need probably,

- knowledge of cloud most common one is AWS so getting a certification would be great.

- knowledge of CI/CD pipelines knowing how SDLC works

- knowing IaC would be great mostly terraform as it’s used throughout the industry

- Linux Commandline and also Bash but some companies use it some not

- Python / Golang (Really depends on the company)

- Docker/kuberenetes (Containerization)

Lastly Patience every good skill takes time and don’t give up on the journey to become DevOps

I hope my answer helps

pirates
started with a degree from art school and very basic linux skills, lucked my way into a basic NOC position doing simple things like pulling logs, opening tickets, troubleshooting network issues and SIP problems, standard operations stuff like change management, working with the sysadmin team on deployments, etc. Started automating that stuff once I was comfortable with Linux/shell and eventually got inspired to set up a raspberry pi at home to tinker with. Spent the better part of a year wading through the deep end, trying to get myself up to speed on most of the basic/middle tier concepts, then finally at one of my reviews I asked to be moved to an opening on the SRE team and they said “sure, we’d like to keep you so if that’s what you want we’ll make it work”.