Advice for someone wanting to switch from backend to devops

Hi everyone! I just joined the sub and this is my first post.

Im a backend engineer with my confort language being TypeScript and NodeJS. In the past i have done some devops work in the project and did pretty good. Most of my devops work consisted on config automation, json / yaml parsing and bash scripting. I managed to get the importance of infrastrure as code and to mitigate admin overhead and develop strategies to test changes.
The reasson why im back on the backend is because the client company faced some budget issues and they cut-off my company devops services, so i was moved back to my original position full-time.

All my professional experience consists on web apps mostly, however in my spare time i do lots of bash scripts and i have done some small apps with python (i love python). I have worked in event-driven workflows as well as syncronous workflows.

I feel like devops is one of those subjects where landing the first job is really hard, mostly because a lot of professionals incurr in bad practices just to get things done fast (such as doing manual input and never reflecting it in the infra code) and because of that companies are very skeptical about hiring someone new (imagine someone with near-zero professional experience!)

Thats why i made this post, if you have any advice that you would give to someone who is trying to transition from backend development to devops, this is the place.

https://redd.it/1bzrpk0
@r_devops

Newbie building first CI/CD

Hi all,

I am completely new, hoping to get some answers here. I am looking to build my first CI/CD which needs to look as close as possible to a production ready version.

I think it's easier to start with GitLab runners, I looked a bit at them and they make sense in my head also can accommodate our needs.

But I was suggested Jenkins as a decent starting point. It looks like Jenkins needs to be run on a server on it's own. How do you guys handle multi project + multi environment CI/CD with Jenkins?

Probably it's better to state what I want the output to look like instead of writing some here nonsense :D

I have two not related project, I already dockerized the project. I am thinking of running them as containers (the traffic we have doesn't seem like we need k8s yet) on at least two environments staging and prod.

Thank you in advanced for reading this post and helping me wrap my head around this task.

https://redd.it/1bzuo3f
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Career Dilemma: Stick with Data Engineering or Jump into Data Science?

I completed a PhD in physics/computer science. With my background in computer science/ML, I managed to secure a research engineer role in the renewable energy sector, aiming to develop a tool for diagnosing power plants. The goal was to build the product and enable the implementation of physical and AI models. Initially, I was interested in both data science and data engineering aspects. However, I've spent about 2 years now focusing on the data engineering part (essential for setting the stage for AI). Now, I feel I'll have to maintain the product's infrastructure and prepare the data pipelines, while others will develop the AI models on their side (Jupyter Notebook kind of work), and once ready, I'll have to implement it into the product.
My initial aim was to understand the workflow of transitioning from a PoC developed in isolation to a usable product, but now I feel stuck in the data engineering (MLOps?) aspect rather than the modeling side, and doing some small personal AI project on my side. I'm unsure whether to continue mastering this part, given the huge demand within the company (and the market) or start looking towards moving more into data science? I'm interested in both, but have a slight preference for data science (mainly reinforcement learning actually). What do you think?

https://redd.it/1bzxf2s
@r_devops

Trying to deep dive service mesh mutual TLS, what am I missing here?

I've setup a service A -> service B communication with istio sidecar installed (from Go custom-built images). I've captured all packets in each service's sidecar. Here's the full trace:
https://imgur.com/a/k3j7nCL

192.168.221.20 - serviceA pod IP
192.168.221.23 - serviceB pod IP
10.104.205.243 - serviceB svc IP

What I don't understand is why am I seeing the packets unencrypted? As far as I know, mTLS should work out of the box. Also, the presence of "x-forwarded-client-cert" header is an indicator that mTLS is active, yet packets are in plain text.

https://redd.it/1bzy2dl
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had DevOps interview at Google ... Here are the questions

Hi Guys, couple months ago I had an interview at Google for Senior Site Reliability Engineer, SE (system engineering) position.
It took me some time to recall questions and write them plus I added some additional relevant questions that I used for preparation. Before the interview I received a pdf "Google Interview Prep Guide Site Reliability Engineering" with areas to prepare and books to read (if somebody needs this pdf dm me and I will forward it)... nevertheless interview was still quite tough and not the typical DevOps interview I was used to.

I'm posting it on https://prepare.sh/engineering/devops/google/

I create this website to help our community with interview prep
If you liked it, please share with your friends so I could do more of devops content, thank you

https://redd.it/1c00ec8
@r_devops

Helpful SRE advice

Found this article about the human side of careers in SRE super useful, lots of advice that I wish I was given in the early days. It's more about convincing people to understand why what you do is important, than technical skill, that make or break you. Let me know what other advice you'd give to a new SRE?

https://redd.it/1c01dpu
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If Dev and Ops Had a Baby — It Would Be Called Winglang

The New Stack released this article about the ex-AWS engineer who built the CDK, now Co-Founder of Wing explaining the challenges with the current cloudscape and DevOps.

https://thenewstack.io/if-dev-and-ops-had-a-baby-it-would-be-called-winglang/


https://redd.it/1c02ssi
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On demand ssh and rdp access to servers

Anyone use anything besides Cyberark or Teleport for ssh and rdp access? More specifically, we need a way to give our teams (if we can to specific developers) access to servers on demand.

https://redd.it/1c0316b
@r_devops

Am I even a DevOps?

Hey, I was doubting if I should write this post or not, yet I guess at this point I need some guidance from experienced people.


So, I'm a 25 y.o. IT guy, that wanted to join the DevOps ranks for several years. After I got my Bachelors in Software Engineering, I started working as a NOC Engineer in a Cybersecurity company almost 5 years ago, and thought that I'd continue my journey as a Cybersec specialist or something closely related to that.

Unfortunately the promissed NOC role was not quite what I expected, mostly me and my colleagueswere just monitoring our system, escalating alerts and following up with their resolutions on various teams. (OPS, DBA, R&D)
6 months after that, my constant bragging to my Manager got us into Incident Management and handling. She was always thoughtful of us and tried to find common solutions for us to get more experienced and be more usefull overall. I was trained to identify incidents, writing and leading RCA and Retrospectives, basically everything that implied the role of Incident Manager. We did not study things like ITIL or anything related to it, but we knew how to do out job and handled the processes well. At some point I leaded the onboarding of new members and optimized monitoring and Incident handling processes in the Company. Yet, 2 years in I felt like I needed something more technical. I never wanted to be a programmer as it is and long forgotten my dream to join Cybersecurity field as it was highly competitive and nigh impossible to rank up in it within my "third-world" country. At that point I really started to get inspired by DevOps philosophy. I started learning basic and essential tools like Docker, Ansible and principals of CI/CD. Tried to do some basic stuff with AWS and read about its services. Took a few courses.

My efforts and good relationships with my Manager allowed me to transfer to our R&D where we had a good senior DevOps who knew his stuff. He started giving me some tasks like container optimization, some easy stuff within K8s (cronjobs, error handling etc.) It seemed like everyone appreciated what I was doing and were generally satisfied.

Eventually, we started to prepare for migration to the cloud (we had several DCs prior to this)
Took some courses from Amazon, experimented. But one day, a bit more than a year ago our company was shut down by the decision of the board of officers. In one day we were left without a job. All 260+ people. At the time, our country was in deep crisis and it was nigh impossible to find a decent job in IT. I was in doubt, I was not a good DevOps in any way or form, but really wanted to continue with that. I pressed on, learned, trained and it took me 4 months to land a job in an awesome AI company, that was looking for a Junior DevOps to support their Senior and document everything that he built throughout 9 years of the company existence. Now, I know, that a Junior DevOps is a blasphemy for the most part, yet at the time my only option was to return to Monitoring and Incident Management. But I did not see any light and future for me in that path.

Going back to the company, I learned to work with Terraform there, documented all the modules, started to write some of my own. We worked on integrating ArgoCD to the infrastructure that was deployed in GKE. At this point in 6 moths I learned even more stuff than before, and fell in love with Terraform.

Until I was left without a job again 4 moths ago... Company lost the most valuable customer, and they had to cut almost everyone that was working there. Leaving only my Senior, CEO, CTO and a newly hired Customer Success manager. We had a really strong rapport with my senior at this point, he even had to cut our finally call, because he was starting to feel unwell from everything that was happening.

And here I am, 4 months into the jobless worldonce again, still trying to continue with my learning and getting a job, yet now it seems even more impossible than before. I applied to hundreds of positions both Junior and Middle, but all I got were only cold

mails that I'm just not a fit. I always tell the truth to HRs about my experiences, without exaggeration and mostly get the response that I'm not experienced enough. I guess, probably I am inexperienced in some things, but does this restrict me from learning? I can sit in front of my pc, create countless labs and all, but how am I supposed to get better, without getting an actual working experience? Everything is even more difficult this time as I'm trying to find a job outside my country, since I already landed one like that. And all the propositions that I get ATM from there are mostly working with old stack, with a salary that's 3-5 times lower than what I had before.
So, basically it, I'm really desperate at this point and don't know what to do. Loosing a job twice in a year threw me into desperation, inability to land even a screening deepened my sorrow and at this point I don't even know If I even have the knowledge and ability to continue.

I'm sorry for such a long post, it's mostly my internal scream at this point. I was hoping, that maybe some of You people could give me a good advice on what should I do next.

https://redd.it/1c01njx
@r_devops

2 Ways AI Assistants are changing Kubernetes Troubleshooting

Blair, Botkube's Product Lead, recently wrote this article on Ways AI Assistants are changing k8s Troubleshooting. Giving AI abilities to run troubleshooting commands within Kubernetes may be powerful, but is it helpful to the DevOps or platform engineer running it? Check out the article and let us know if you think the benefits of AI are helping DevOps engineers with their workloads.

https://redd.it/1c07mr3
@r_devops

CI/CD assessment

Hello everyone,

Do you know any assessment out there related to best practices on continuos integration and delivery?

I would like to assess an existing approach from both perspectives, the application and also the CI/CD platform.

Thanks

https://redd.it/1c08458
@r_devops

What is the point of Ansible & would I benefit from it

Hey,

I keep hearing 'ansible!!' & I have looked around and started learning about these playbooks but what do they save me from doing? So far, I have just witnessed it saving me from writing 'kubectl apply -f x.yaml' when my FluxCD already does this for me. [ For those who don't know Flux is a GitOps tool which pulls your YAML files from a GitHub repo & auto applies them, periodically checking for changes\]

My current setup is 4x deployment YAMLs, 2x service YAMLs, 2x Ingress Resource, 1x Ingress Controller. Happy to provide more info in comments, just ask.

Is this something I should spend time on, what do you guys use your Ansible playbooks for?

​

https://redd.it/1c09ich
@r_devops

DataDog impressions so far... Meh?

Not sure how to best categorize my feelings towards DataDog at this point. Initially it looked really promising and I was pretty excited to get my hands dirty with it. But perhaps I'm a bit lukewarm on it right now. I have to say I like some of the features but it just seems like there is not enough value for the money.

Since there are so many facets to DataDog I'll sum up what I'm using on the platform:

* Logging
* Metrics & Monitoring
* Dashboards (primarily for k8s)

Something just isn't clicking with DataDog for me. My goal is to replace some of the current disparate solutions in place today that are causing some pain-points like Nagios, Munin, Graphite, and Google Logging & Monitoring. But as of today I just don't feel confident that DataDog is that much better than what I have today.

Are others feeling the same way I am? Or am I slowly going insane?

I'm curious what are some other solutions that you are using today or have used in the past?


https://redd.it/1c0b4rp
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Missing tag service in aws

Is there service that will find missing tags in aws or just a lambda function ?

https://redd.it/1c04luz
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Company put me into a pip, what should I do?

My employer put me in pip, a performance improvement plan (PIP), i heard this many times, but never have real experience with it.
HR start to involve in this process.

What should I do?
Should I quit it now? How serious it is?

I have no clue, can anyone give suggestions?



https://redd.it/1c0d42k
@r_devops

Bored at my current job. Should I consider joining a start-up for my next one (Netherlands)?

In a very weird sort of way I'm envious of the people here saying their burnt-out. For me it's the opposite; I am bored shitless at the consultancy I currently work for. I was on the bench for six months and I got so bored that it really started to mess with my mental health and I had to raise the alarm with my manager. When I did finally get put on a project it was ok, but it was small-scale and straightforward. We delivered what we agreed within two weeks and now we're waiting for the next statement of work. So for now at least I'm back to sitting on my ass watching certification videos.

I personally don't like the slow pace. I like being given a bit of a challenge and there is a lot that I want to learn more of (more higher level languages, administering K8s, GitOps, scaling for lots of users, chaos engineering, plenty of others). Start-ups I know tend to run at a faster pace and often have stakeholders that are expecting something to be delivered. I know it can be stressful but I just miss working on tangible deliverables that's got some kind of purpose behind it. I also like having a social connection with my colleagues which is also what I'm missing at my current job. It's a nice feeling to be able to go out for beers together on Friday evening after working hard on something for that week, which (I think) seems to be the culture at a lot of start-ups. On the other hand I don't want to get too burnt out. I like working hard but I'm reluctant to work outside of regular working hours, and although I don't have a family I have a life outside work.

Despite my impressions of what it's like at start-ups I've not actually worked at one, so that's why I'm here. What's your experiences of working at start-ups (anywhere but Netherlands/EU especially)? Could it be something good for someone in my situation?

For context, I've been doing DevOps for about 5 years and I've got quite a lot of experience with AWS, I've written lots of Terraform, built lots of CI/CD pipelines, done a lot of with containers (although not much K8s but I have my CKA), set up observability platforms and done a bit of SRE and Linux administration.

https://redd.it/1c0g5rz
@r_devops

GCP - Storage Buckets - Nix - Docker

This is a repost of my post made in r/webdev as i did not get a singe response.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1byd02r/mkdocs\_and\_google\_cloud\_storage\_bucket\_suggested/

I am curious about opinions not necessary solutions.



How would you solve a 'webserver' depended deployment on GCP - Ressources to recommend?

---

Mkdocs and Google Cloud Storage Bucket - Suggested Solutions (Ways)
I am new to (Terraform) and GCP and looked for a simple first project.
Deploying mkdocs in a google storage bucket is what i decided to try out.
I can use a Docker image to run and serve a local development instance of mkdocs with the mkdocs-material plugin.
I also setup a nix (shell)environment to have an easy way to just create bundle without having to worry about local dependencies.
In my nix shell i can create and serve the built mkdocs easily. (works with either a simple node web server (local-wqeb-server) or the python http.server
It also works in a Docker container i set up for fun (rather than mounted volumes in dev mode for hot reload)
So now just for validation before I get into terraform i wanted to manually set up a storage bucket and drop in the built mkdocs dist.
I get the bucket online can configure iam and have it either publicly available or behind an identiy aware proxy.
The problem is the `index.html` or rather the built directory of mkdocs behaves weirdly - i get an index file that can not navigate nor parses it's css.
Does a storage bucket act like regular file system - how do i get it to act as an http server?
I have not yet setup a load balancer. According to there instructions, is that the step i am missing?
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website?hl=de
I got so annoyed that i now want to know "all" ways i could get that online in a 'working' way (on GCP)
I am considering Cloud Run with the Docker Image now (Artifact Registry?)
Are there any good ressources to get started with GCP? End goal is a Next Application that has to communicate with a custom Nest Backend all managed via terraform and some ci pipelines.
Sorry for the long post, guess I just needed to get off some steam.


Edit: Forgot to add orignal link

https://redd.it/1c0iyw8
@r_devops

DevOps Days Conference

Is the DevOps Days conference still relevant given AWS reinvent/GCP Cloud Next??

DevOps Days

https://redd.it/1c0k8cs
@r_devops

Aws config vs terraform

i'm struggling to see the point of AWS Config or any other compliance checks in a world of IaC. If we just code the compliance, let's say terraform and run it frequently, what's the point? what am i missing?

https://redd.it/1c0lvbd
@r_devops

Help me to find an IaC management platform

Hello,

Does anyone know any tool like foreman for IaC managment that runs on k8s ???
I need from this tool to perform IaC tasks (lets say a version update of a package in a VM).
The main problem with foreman is that it is old and they doesnt provide a helm chart to install it in k8s, i could write the helm charts but this an other tool that i should to maintain.
I dont care about the tool uses puppet, Ansible or any other tool like this, i will adapt.


https://redd.it/1c0obp5
@r_devops