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
@r_devops

Missing tag service in aws

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

https://redd.it/1c04luz
@r_devops

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

Sidework

Where is good source to find side work.

https://redd.it/1c0ohbo
@r_devops

How much time is considered OK to wait for a service to be built?

Hey everyone,
I’m kinda new to being a Backend Developer, and I’ve hit a snag at work that feels a bit odd to me. We end up waiting a lot, around 40%-60% of our day, just for our code to move through the CI/CD flow and get into the Staging or Nightly setups. It takes about 20 minutes to wait for each run, and the actual scaling-up part only takes a minute.
Is this usual? I’ve got a hunch that our DevOps setup isn’t quite right, but I can’t pinpoint the issue. It just seems wrong to spend so much time just waiting around for builds.
And yeah, people suggest working on something else while waiting, but it’s not that simple. When we do our thing and test it locally, it often doesn’t work out the same way when it’s finally deployed. We run into all sorts of problems, like the endpoints we’re working with might be on a different version or using different encryption than we have locally. It’s a real headache, especially when trying to tweak things to improve our services. Every little change needs to go through the whole CI/CD process again, which really holds us back.

FYI, in comparison, the service is built + tested locally in 1-2 minutes at worst

https://redd.it/1c0quoq
@r_devops

Https via docker for microservice in Asp.net

Hey everyone,
I'm facing a bit of a snag and could use some guidance. So, I'm working on dockerizing a microservice for our identity service using ASP.NET Web API. Locally, it runs smoothly, but when I try to run it via a Docker container, it just doesn't cooperate. Turns out, it needs to run via HTTPS within Docker too.
Now, I'm looking to set this up for our development environment, along with a pipeline setup. I've done some digging and found a few potential solutions, like attaching an SSL certificate directly or using Docker Compose. But honestly, I'm not sure which approach would be the best fit for our scenario.
If any of you have experience with this or could offer some advice, I'd really appreciate it!
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

https://redd.it/1c0rb93
@r_devops

Questionnaire for my Bachelor's degree

Hello,

For my bachelor's degree I'm studying which would be the key factors that would cause IT employees to resign from their current job.

It would help me a lot if you could complete the questionnaire below.

I promise it won't take long, 5 minutes.

Thank you very much!

Questionnaire link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScrxwF21-GyaV_KZFRYR1NOpUiwW_yMQLROQ453w4wszE5oiA/viewform?pli=1

https://redd.it/1c0uvap
@r_devops

Free or cheap hosting for frontend, backend and DB

I am not sure this is ideal for this subreddit but I my family in law asked me to create a application solution for them and deploy it. I like doing this stuff but I am only struggling with the hosting part. I plan on creating a Frontend (reactjs) Backend (Go|Javascript|python) and need a database. Probably MySQL.

I am used on using kubernetes because I use that at my job but I was wondering how and where could I host this for a cheap price. I only need necessary uptime 3/4 a week. If I could find a cheaper kubernetes hosting or container hosting I would choose that. Even docker compose would be nice.

If anyone knows anything and can give me some tips, I would appreciate it.

https://redd.it/1c0x2cj
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"Gracefully" Implementing Graceful Shutdowns

When deploying a new version of an application, it is essential to ensure that no tasks are lost during the deployment process. This is especially important for applications that use WebSockets to maintain real-time connections with clients. In such cases, abruptly terminating the application can lead to data loss and client disconnections.

This blog demonstrates how to implement graceful shutdowns using FastAPI and Kubernetes, that use web sockets client connections, and internal background queues.


Read the full blog here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gracefully-implementing-graceful-shutdowns-jainal-gosaliya-pps5e/

https://redd.it/1c0w5qu
@r_devops

Pipelines help

I'm quite new to pipelines and still learning about it. Currently I have a server(VM with SSMS on azure)

I'm trying to create a new pipeline from dev ops to backup(a selected database) and restore that backup as a different name(with mdf and ldf names changed as a variable). I would also like to run SQL scripts on that database with the pipeline.

How would I go about creating this pipeline? Would I need to use power shell scripts for this/power shell scripts to run the SQL scripts or use YAML scripts.

Any general steps would be appreciated to just get a basic idea.

https://redd.it/1c0vs0i
@r_devops

Getting laid off, advice on a good next role?

I’m an associate in devops, have about 1.5 YOE. It’s been such a deep dive learning everything, and I am not sure if i’ll be able to land another DevOps job- it’s the only programming job i’ve had so far so it’s all i know.. what other roles should i apply to that can make use of my DevOps skills?
I’ve been working with python, bamboo, EKS, terraform, ansible, artifactory, grafana, kubernetes, helm.. can go on- but my experience in these areas is not as deep as i’d like it to be. Currently working on getting my AWS Cloud practitioner cert, but again i don’t think i have enough knowledge to pick up another DevOps job.
Any advice on other related roles I can apply to would be really helpful! I love working on the back end of things. Most likely getting laid off in August so I’ve got a bit of time to upskill as well.

https://redd.it/1c11g1g
@r_devops