Moving into Devops Role

Hi All,

I am currently working as a network automation developer where I write python apps (django) and also standalone scripts using python or ansible to either configure or get data from network devices. I am also quite comfortable with linux, not to the level of a linux admin but pretty much anything linux related is sent to me in the team. My team consists of network engineers and I am the only dev in the team. The servers we use are on prem VM's nothing AWS etc.

I would like to move into Devops/SRE role and would like to know the skills that I need to pickup to be able to move into these types of roles.

Thanks in advance,

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Monthly 'Shameless Self Promotion' thread - 2021/08

Feel free to post your personal projects here. Just keep it to one project per comment thread.

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Monthly 'Getting into DevOps' thread - 2021/08

What is DevOps?

[AWS has a great article](https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/) that outlines DevOps as a work environment where development and operations teams are no longer "siloed", but instead work together across the entire application lifecycle -- from development and test to deployment to operations -- and automate processes that historically have been manual and slow.

Books to Read

The Phoenix Project - one of the original books to delve into DevOps culture, explained through the story of a fictional company on the brink of failure.
[The DevOps Handbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942788002) - a practical "sequel" to The Phoenix Project.
Google's Site Reliability Engineering - Google engineers explain how they build, deploy, monitor, and maintain their systems.
[The Site Reliability Workbook](https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/toc/) - The practical companion to the Google's Site Reliability Engineering Book
The Unicorn Project - the "sequel" to The Phoenix Project.
[DevOps for Dummies](https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Dummies-Computer-Tech-ebook/dp/B07VXMLK3J/) - don't let the name fool you.

What Should I Learn?

Emily Wood's essay - why infrastructure as code is so important into today's world.
[2019 DevOps Roadmap](https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap#devops-roadmap) - one developer's ideas for which skills are needed in the DevOps world. This roadmap is controversial, as it may be too use-case specific, but serves as a good starting point for what tools are currently in use by companies.
This comment by /u/mdaffin - just remember, DevOps is a mindset to solving problems. It's less about the specific tools you know or the certificates you have, as it is the way you approach problem solving.
[This comment by /u/jpswade](https://gist.github.com/jpswade/4135841363e72ece8086146bd7bb5d91) - what is DevOps and associated terminology.
Roadmap.sh - Step by step guide for DevOps or any other Operations Role

Remember: DevOps as a term and as a practice is still in flux, and is more about culture change than it is specific tooling. As such, specific skills and tool-sets are not universal, and recommendations for them should be taken only as suggestions.

Previous Threads
https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/obssx3/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202107/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/npua0y/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202106/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/n2n1jk/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202105/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/mhx15t/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202104/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/lvet1r/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202103/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/la7j8w/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202102/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/koijyu/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202101/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/k4v7s0/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202012/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/jmdce9/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202011/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/j3i2p5/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202010/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/ikf91l/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202009/

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/i1n8rz/monthlygettingintodevopsthread202008/


Please keep this on topic (as a reference for those new to devops).

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Non/New DevOps people of this sub, when did the terminology used by the experienced users here "clicked" for you?

Hey guys,

So I'm a junior sysadmin who likes to browse this sub to pick up on news, discussions and overall I'm just interested in this automation world. I work a lot with AWS, I script a lot with PS and Python and overall I automate a lot of things that almost make me look like somewhat of a DevOps.

With that being said, 90% of the topics in this sub barely make sense to me and I was wondering how natural is that? People often dive into their environments and how they manage certificates, how they automate pipelines, how they build databases, but I have no idea what they're talking about. Of course those examples are just off the top of my head.

Sure, I can Google things, but I'm always wondering if a lot of the topics here are super specific scenarios, or I'm just not as "knowledgeable" as I'd hoped. I'm learning about DevOps in my free time and I've yet to touch a lot of these subjects.

When did things "click" for you?

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kubedex is back

I took a year off from blogging. To be honest I was running out of topics. But things have changed massively in the past 12 months so I've begun to bring the site up to date again.

If there are any Kubernetes related topics you think I should look into let me know below.

https://kubedex.com/kubedex-is-back/

https://redd.it/ow97jp
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Understanding the Ops part of devops

Ok. So I am a Manager. Specifically a security manager. I am now a product owner for the cyber squad. I have no staff, I have no direct responsibilities.

I have a scrum master who runs the sprints. He delivers the projects and he delivers the ops day to day work.

Coming from old school business I am struggling with this. My team is run by a project manager. I just write stories based on requirements from my peers and communicate the BAU tasks that he needs to get the team to do.

I’ll admit, I am bored. I see opportunity, but I miss the manager role.

Is this version of devops the norm?

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Is there a downtime when migrating to a load balancer?

Now I am using a digital ocean VM like this:
DNS -> Droplet

If I add a lb in between, is there a downtime here due to DNS propagation? Can I avoid this downtime?
DNS -> LB -> Droplet

I am thinking to use digital ocean or cloudflare load balancer. The reason is because I want to upgrade the single server without time or increase the capacity during peak period

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Triggering K8s Jobs internally?

We at present host of containers with ECS, and are looking to move into K8s.

Our batch layer at present has a controller container, that triggers tasks based on need, via AWS's apis.

In order to move this into K8s, we plan on creating yamls for Jobs, but I was wondering how we go about triggering the jobs themselves. I mean we could ask the devs to program it, but I guess we need to store the kubeconfig as a secret or configMap in the cluster to be able to load it? Or is there a better way?

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DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering - how to choose your poison

Hi folks!

I've been a software developer for quite a long time, but relatively recently, I've moved into the SRE role. My new job responsibilities were quite clear from the beginning, thanks to the Google SRE book (easy to understand and apply) and the already established SRE culture in the company. But the new domain itself was quite vague. I'd been struggling to understand the difference between DevOps and SRE; both seemed to be the same but felt quite different based on the job offers I was getting periodically. So, I was confused about how to position myself in the new market and what skills should I invest time into? Basically, same feelings that I had when I was just starting my software dev career - I had no good understanding of the potential areas of focus. Do I wanna be a backend, a frontend, a full-stack, or a data engineer? What's the difference between these roles? Are there other options? So, after a year of being a true SRE and then a year more of being an SRE in Platform Engineering, and periodic analysis of the market, I managed to come up with a more or less consistent picture in my head. So, sharing it here in case someone is in the same trouble of grasping the domain for the sake of self-orienting.

P.S. All things in the post are IMO, and probably other people may have totally different experiences. So, let's try to keep it an open forum.

https://redd.it/owdyxl
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Question about secrets inside git repositories and how to deal with them

Hi,

I'm having some problems when removing secrets such as API keys and credentials from files in our Github repositories.

According to multiple people/articles the best course of action is to remove the offending files (e.g. ".env" and "google-services.json") and add them to .gitignore in order to prevent them to be reintroduced to the repository. In my point of view it will only result in the secret being shared in many other places such as instant messagers since developers need them to test their applications.

What do you guys do in this case? Is there a standard way to go about this problem?

PS: I was looking into a tool called BlackBox by StackExchange which keeps the file inside the repository, but it's encrypted using GPG, which seems to be a good strategy keeping the secret safe and the secret sprawl under control.

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DevOps stress level, what do you think?

Hi all,
How high, in your opinion, are the stress levels for a DevOps job, and what they are impacted by?
Meaning, what can contribute to increased stress and what can help reduce it?


This came up today when I was talking to a friend of mine, who argued that DevOps was one of the most stressful roles in the dev organization (hence he can't quit smoking :) ).


Unhealthy lifestyle choices aside, what do you think?

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Scaling Prometheus to handle high cardinality data at high scale

https://engineering.razorpay.com/scaling-to-trillions-of-metric-data-points-f569a5b654f2

What were your experiences on Prometheus for such use cases?

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Favorite cloud logging service for small team/project?

Looking for opinions on cloud-based logging systems for a 3-person dev team running a service that has pretty low request volume for now. We don't have any complex analytics needs yet; nor do we have thousands of hosts to aggregate across. Mostly need something that will let us do reasonable full-text search across a dozen or so hosts and do simple "regex X matched more than Y times in the last hour" kinds of alerting. Real-time tailing of logs would be nice to have as well.

One slightly unusual requirement is that our system has a mix of AWS hosts and a small number of on-premises servers at customer sites, and we want all the logs to go to one place.

When I last evaluated services like this at a previous company, I ended up choosing Scalyr and was mostly happy with it, but that was 7 years ago so maybe there are new entrants I haven't heard of.

Self-hosting an ELK stack or such is an option but not our preference given our small size and our lack of experience operating our own logging and alerting infrastructure, plus the on-premises part of our setup.

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An alternative to latest Linus vide about Marvis?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrhzKOiRzV8

This looks like some kind of proxy packed up with a lot of monitoring tools, but it ended up with a nice UI.

Wondering if there is something similar for home network

https://redd.it/owgzjl
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Is DevOps as a profession too beholden to Big Cloud?

This has been bothering me for some time now, and I just cannot find anyone talking about it in the context of DevOps as a professional role.

We all know Amazon, Microsoft and Google absolutely dominate the cloud space. Simultaneously the same companies also happen to dominate incredibly large swaths of the tech space in general.

Some of us may also know the rising controversies around "Big Tech" and the consequences of their extraordinary power with regards to privacy, deplatforming, but also technical over-dependence of the entire internet's infrastructure on the few big players. AWS is basically a global example of a Single Point of Failure. AWS has an outage, third of the internet is disrupted.

Yet the few professions (like DevOps and SREs) which could do something about it seems to just happily contribute to the situation.

Almost EVERY job offer lists AWS, Azure or GCP as a requirement or a preference, and seemingly everyone who is into DevOps seems to be perfectly happy with the situation despite the fact that there are plenty of other clouds, the likes of Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner or even IBM Cloud. And we should be the first ones to understand the concept of not putting all eggs into one basket when it comes to infrastructure.

I almost feel like DevOps Engineers effectively work FOR big tech as their unpaid salespeople, all too eager to just jump on the bandwagon of big cloud and never stop to think if maybe they could differentiate a little bit, that maybe AWS, Azure or GCP aren't always the only or even the best solution.

I understand being pragmatic in your professional life, but there must be some space for a wiggle room, for influencing your organisations away from centralization both within your current roles and in your choices of new roles. But most of all, I feel like this is absolutely worth talking about, which nobody seems to be doing.

I wonder what others think? Am I off the mark somehow?

https://redd.it/owm5pz
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8 tricks to use S3 more effectively with Python

Leverage the power of S3 in Python by:

1. Reading objects without downloading them
2. Downloading files to a temporary directory
3. Specifying content type when uploading files
4. Retrieving only objects with a specific content-type
5. Hosting a static HTML report
6. Generating presigned URLs for temporary access
7. Uploading large files with multipart upload
8. Making use of S3 Transfer Acceleration

​

I've put together a "how to" on each of these 8 methods (incl code snippets) here: https://dashbird.io/blog/aws-s3-python-tricks/

https://redd.it/owfa67
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Is leaving the only way to get a big pay day?

I've been with the same company for coming up on 10 years and they've treated me well in terms of increasing pay over the years, especially considering I started at an entry-level salary with no related educational or professional background; however, I've seen people jump ship and get big pay days. I've also had co-workers get offers and use those as leverage to stay, but something about doing that for the sake of a raise feels slimy to me. The trouble is, I can't imagine walking into my boss's ~~office~~ Slack channel to ask for a 10-20k raise just for the sake of being on par with someone who left for the same position at another company.

I know my boss has been pleased with my growth and contributions and I feel like I've taken advantage of opportunities to take ownership of things over the past few years and while I've had a couple of small raises during that time, I know that connections of mine with similar experience are making 10, 20 or even 30k more at other companies in the area, so my question is - is leaving the only realistic option if I want a big pay day?

I love everything about the company I work for. The technology, the culture and the work-life balance are ideal, but I just continually get that feeling that I could be making a lot more elsewhere; that being said, I'm very non-confrontational, so I'd hate to blow it asking for too much and have them assume that I'm on my way out if they can't deliver what I'm asking for because I'd much rather have a job than be forced to go find something else.

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Any good docker box for production Wordpress?

Looking for some good boxes using varnish and nginx. I am also looking for something better with more advanced caching.

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Any good LEMP stack for leaning purpose?

I have a really old application, and I want to update the docker-compose file, but I would like to see a few examples to test out various things, I have a lot of images and some of the images may not be compatible with other images, so I need to figure out a way on how to fix everything in our dockerized application.

https://redd.it/owqnwm
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Transitioning from sysadmin to DevOps.

Yeah I know DevOps isn't supposed to be a title, been it's been morphed into one. I'm a system admin and have been for about 10 years. Sysadmin jobs are basically all dead at this point, and I have like 40 years until I retire, so I have to retool at some point. The only scripting skills I have are in PowerShell and the only tooling that I have any experience with is Ansible.

Has anyone else in this sub come from a background of system administration, if so what skills carried over? I assume that most jobs under the DevOps umbrella want expert level skills right out of the gate, so I have no idea how anyone new breaks into this field.

https://redd.it/owrsa3
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How do I setup a "service account" to hit the compute API? (Azure hellscape)

I can't figure out how to hit the compute api. I just want to get a hello world query where I get back a list of VMs. In AWS, you simple create a service account and apply the given READ permissions.

In Azure, I'm having trouble figuring out how they want you to do that. I'm using the new typescript packages "@azure/arm-compute". It requires a tenantId, clientId, clientSecret and subscriptionId which I've found and seems to be authenticating okay.

However, I get back the following error because the "Azure AD" "App registration" doesn't have permissions for

```"error":{"code":"AuthorizationFailed","message":"The client '123 with object id 'abc' does not have authorization to perform action 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/read' over scope '/subscriptions/123/resourceGroups/testing_group/providers/Microsoft.Compute' or the scope is invalid. If access was recently granted, please refresh your credentials."}}

```

I can't for the life of me figure out how to give this "Azure AD" "App registration" the relevant permissions. You would think it'd be the easiest thing in the world, but it seems hidden.

When I go to "API permissions" under the application, I hit "add permission" and then "Azure Service Management", it won't show me any permissions and I can't select "Application permissions" only "Delegated permissions".

Does anyone know what's going on? Also can anyone point me to how I get paid support from azure? I'll literally pay whatever to get this solved lol but even paying them money they make hard to find how to do that.

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