Advice Needed: Upskill or Apply Now? (DevOps Engineer)

Hey!!

Here a DevOps Engineer with 5+ years of experience looking for some guidance on my next career move. I've been feeling a bit stagnant in my current role and am eager for a new challenge and a competitive salary increase.

Here's my current skillset:
Strong foundation in containerization technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, Helm)
Experienced with CI/CD pipelines, including DevSecOps implementation
Solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS and GCP)
While I haven't dived into programming languages yet, I'm actively learning Go.

Now, the real question:

1. Given my background, what would be the best approach for my next step?
2. Should I continue working and apply to new companies concurrently?
Or would it be more beneficial to spend the next few months upskilling before applying?
3. Additionally, I'd love some insights from the community on which tech stacks are currently in high demand for high-paying DevOps roles.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

https://redd.it/1c3wypy
@r_devops

How do you call a team, that focuses on DevEx, DevRel, and PE?

I often see DevOps, Developer Experience, Platform Engineering, and Developer Relations used interchangeably. They overlap a lot and the implementation is always company-specific.

What kind of setups you have seen, know, and where? What are these teams called?


To open up my thinking, here’s a bit longer rant.

So, it’s said that DevOps originated from Agile practices and applies those principles beyond software teams. It’s not a team, since ”agile” is not a team. It extends it with e2e responsibility.

We often talk about Developer Experience, which is the satisfaction and usability of tools, technologies, and processes that developers use in their work. DevOps improves Developer Experience.

The modern ecosystem and the number of tools and resources are overwhelming. As a natural continuum for this cause, Platform Engineering is the enabler of value delivery and limits the scope and complexity of underlying tooling. Product teams do not need to invest time on that and can focus on product development.

I think that Platform Engineering is a logical extension of DevOps. You need DevOps skills to do Platform Engineering.

Developer Relations is an old concept. To summarize: Awareness building, Creating content, Education, Tech demos, Community building, Advocating and sharing knowledge, Empathizing with developers, and Acquiring feedback. It’s meant to prevent information loss between teams.

https://redd.it/1c45jkl
@r_devops

Promtail Metrics and Logs Dashboard

Hello Community,

I’ve just created another Grafana dashboard, this time for Promtail, utilizing Prometheus and Loki datasources. To be honest, I couldn’t find anything maintained and actually looking good/useful. If you notice any important elements missing, please let me know.

In the blog post I explained labels and variables requirements in Prometheus and Promtail

- Github repo
- Grafana Dashboards 20881 ID

https://redd.it/1c45ctl
@r_devops

Resources For Terraform Associate, LP1 Certification, and AWS Developer Associate

Hey guys,

I have worked in the DevOps domain for the past three years and have had extensive hands-on experience, which convinces me to bag up these certifications within the next two months.

I plan on referring to these resources for my preparation. Your fruitful input would be highly appreciated:
1. Terraform Associate - KodeKloud
2. LP1 - TBD
3. AWS Developers Associate - Stephen on Udemy

Can somebody suggest resources if they have cleared the abovementioned certifications or any advice I could benefit from?


https://redd.it/1c45xug
@r_devops

Best Grafana combo to keep tract of aws/azure resource cost

I want to monitor cost of aws and I would like to use Grafana to display cost of all resources with proper tags. What is best combination of grafana maybe telegram to get all the cost dospalyed.

https://redd.it/1c49qvc
@r_devops

Spin-up a Kubernetes cluster on personal computer/laptop

Spin-up a Kubernetes cluster on personal computer/laptop

https://medium.com/linux-shots/spin-up-a-kubernetes-cluster-on-personal-laptop-97a511e28564

https://redd.it/1c4bnyb
@r_devops

Help me understand the DevOps process

Noob here. Just wanted to understand the interaction between dev and DevOps while deploying an application.

1. A developer writes some code
2. The code is deployed through a CI/CD pipeline to the dev env
3. The developer contacts DevOps for the API or how to access the application for testing

Is this how the workflow looks?

How does this process change with the adoption of K8s Gateway API? I’m guessing devs can create and deploy route resources to access the APIs without disturbing DevOps?

TIA 🙏


https://redd.it/1c4eaxq
@r_devops

How can I learn to be more independent at my role?

I was hired as a Junior DevOps and have been learning a lot in the 6 months I've been in this role. My manager is doing great work on finding tasks and projects that span across multiple subjects, so I got to learn a lot of new things really quickly.

It might be my lack of experience, but I'm reliant on my manager handing out tasks for me to do. Some days if he's not available for a while, I find myself without much to work on so I just kind browse this sub, spin up stuff on my KinD cluster, etc.

I was wondering how can I become more independent. A more seasoned DevOps person would probably know how to recognize things that can be improved like missing automations, fixing pain points for our devs, etc. I feel like I'm not even close to a point where I can come to my manager and tell him "look what I've been working on without you holding my hand for a change".

Any tips to improve?

Thanks

https://redd.it/1c4f1tn
@r_devops

Infrastructure from Code (IfC) and winglang

Has anyone tried both or any of these paradigms?

From a first look they seem to me quite similar to the ideas of CDK and CDKTF, but with different branding like "cloud-oriented programming language" for Wingland and IfC for providers mentioned at https://infrastructurefromcode.com/ which seem to be more like Heroku / Vercel / DigitalOcean type of abstractions on top of other cloud providers, at an extra cost. Maybe a better question would be: How do IfC platforms differ from "serverless" cloud offering from providers like the ones mentioned?

https://redd.it/1c4g14b
@r_devops

Considering switch to Blue-Green deploy model, how to handle DB sync?

Hi all,

First of all - I'm not a devops, but a QA Lead, and one of my long term quality goals includes switching my company's deployment model to blue/green (now it's essentially roll out and pray for the best). However, my issue is that each production environment includes a orders database (we're an online retailer), and architects are concerned about discrepancies with orders stored in DB in case we rollback or switch productions. So in a nutshell - I'm looking for a solution, that would keep both blue and green DBs synced with actual information and prevent losing orders, duplication, etc.

My thought is - perhaps some sort of a broker between the two DBs, that would only store and cast this essential info?

Would greatly appreciate any advice.

https://redd.it/1c4g71a
@r_devops

What is OpenID Connect Authentication? A Practical Guide

Hello, devops community,
Today, I present to you a topic that is less discussed and often taken for granted in our daily jobs.
OpenID Connect is among our industry's most widely used and least discussed topics.
Yet, it is so crucial when it comes to granting third-party access to a service provider. Have you seen those "sign-in with Google" before!?
In this guide, I will explain the notion of OIDC using a practical, real-world example: granting GitHub Actions access to an AWS account.
Feel free to ask any questions that come up.
https://developer-friendly.blog/2024/04/14/what-is-openid-connect-authentication-a-practical-guide/


\#oauth2 #oidc #github #aws

https://redd.it/1c4fbhh
@r_devops

Deny rules in RBAC

Hi Guys,
Is it possible to deny a rule on all the RBAC roles?
I want to deny or exclude -
Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/generateUserDelegationKey.
By default Contributor, Storage Account Contributor and few others have them and I don't want these roles have this permission.
Is it possible in azure to deny? Kindly let me know, I have tried to check on the internet but not able to find much.

https://redd.it/1c4jfvk
@r_devops

Need advice on giving developers more information on their e2e runs

We're running e2e test suites using Argo Workflows. The flow is basically:

1. Setup the environment
2. Run tests
3. Upload results to our TestOps platform (RPortal)
4. Send Slack message to the team with links to Grafana, RPortal, etc.

Our e2e tests are running on spot nodes which are sometimes relcaimed during the run (they take about 2-3 hours). If the node was reclaimed during the test then there is no output from step 2, which means once the workflow reaches the part where it uploads the results to RPortal, the result is empty and the developers are not sure what happened.

I'm looking for advice on how to improve this flow. We do send Slack messages on failed runs, but they show as failed whether the node was reclaimed or the tests simply failed. In my case, the devs kind of rely on the results in Report Portal, which show as empty. I was thinking I might handle "empty" results by uploading a simple text file as the test results that would state that something went wrong during the workflow which is not related to the tests suite.

Any suggestions would be great :)

https://redd.it/1c4kdjj
@r_devops

DevOps Professionals: Are You Limited to Roles Specifically Labeled 'DevOps' or Exploring Other Titles Like 'Cloud Engineer'?

I have been navigating the job market and while I currently have a role in devops I have also looked at roles that have similar requirements to devops roles that are listed as cloud engineer or etc..

I am curious if anyone else has taken roles that are really devops but not titled as such.

https://redd.it/1c4lcy3
@r_devops

Forgotten Origins of LXC/LXD

I'm not sure if this is the correct place compared to /Kubernetes or /Docker. Maybe I'm also off base on this... Just wanted to ask about/share some thoughts/rant. I don't even have a problem just talking to the void.

Is LXC/LXD not the origin of both Kubernetes and Docker? Docker originally being released essentially as a wrapper of LXC. And LXD being a container orchestrator supporting standard APIs, networking, cluster support, etc. I'm generalizing a bit, but the concepts behind LXC and LXD were well ahead of later adaptations of similar projects. These are essentially primitives of our current abstractions, yet I never hear/read anything about LXC/LXD anymore? There is no drawing correlations or explaining the alternatives in recent blog posts, guides, etc.

Why is it? Both projects are still alive and supported, seemingly able to solve a lot of the same problems. Is it just not preferred anymore due to more features or usability of newer products (I assume)? Is it performance and I'm stupid to run containers in LXD cluster? There is a certain level of "pureness" that I like.

One last thing - is anybody using Incus or seeing more popularity? Actually reason for this post is due to seeing this project seems to be lead by previous LXD maintainers. Except it seems not tied to Canonical this time. I'm interested but don't see much traction yet.

https://redd.it/1c4kp5o
@r_devops

Question - How do you guys do Patching?

Question on how you all do Patching - both Windows and Linux? is it integrated in any way into your build process or do you use a dedicated patching software? If you use a dedicated software, what do you use?

Any thoughts, regrets, lessons learned that can be shared are helpful.

We still use WSUS with the old Solarwinds add on, but we want to move that into something modern and more effective. Ours is "ok" but needs improvement in all areas - Installation, Compliance, Reporting.

https://redd.it/1c4mayd
@r_devops

How do you define your SLA?

I'm trying to brush up on my basic SRE chops and was reading ye olde Google posts on calculating SLOs based on past performance, and I know that SLA's are supposed to just be an agreement to meet that SLO, but is this really how it works in your organization?

Back in the day the answer often boiled down to 'our biggest enterprise customer forced us to guarantee this SLA,' and since so many other decisions like the cadence of monitoring are based on your SLA, how does your team define the SLA you're trying to deliver?

https://redd.it/1c4j7da
@r_devops

Any ex-TAM(technical account manager) having/had issues to return into the hands on IT market?

The title is self explanatory.

https://redd.it/1c4rwyg
@r_devops

I’m conflicted

Last year I’d taken over the CI/CD for the entire UI team wrangling their massive web monorepo, porting iOS to Az and building everything from the command line, as well as Android. I was handling building and detecting all of the apps on the web, containerizing them, and generating reports for them. Backend was a different story as they do something completely different.

So everything was nice and consolidated into AZDO.

Well, the UI director recently decided that they were taking over CI and I would handle delivery of the artifacts. Now they’re using GitHub Actions.

Now I feel like we’re digging deeper into silos.

I often say that DevOps should be a culture not a title. And part of me is a little relieved not to have to worry about it, but also it’s just going to be further fragmented and harder to maintain.

Do y’all think this is a good change or stepping backwards? Does DevOps handle the entire lifecycle or just the logistics of getting packages from A to B?

https://redd.it/1c4swmo
@r_devops

About Fullstack Web App Deployment.

Hi team,

I have a frontend (react) , backend (spring) and mysql database, how can I deploy. Can I deploy all in any one compute engine like digital ocaen droplets or deploy the frontend in Netlify and backend and db together on Compute Engine. Which is the best approach, if I use netlify how it balances the load, where as in droplet containing all in one VM I use nginx as load balancer.
Kindly le me know which one should I go for. Which optimized and the best way to do deployment. Thanks

https://redd.it/1c4v1eb
@r_devops

Keeping Old Deployments

I don't have too much devOps experience, but I'm wondering what others do when it comes to old deployments on production, staging, and dev servers.


Is there any value in keeping all old deployments on any of these servers?
Is there any harm in deleting them?
What is best practice for "cleaning up" deployments on servers?


I'm starting to run out of hard drive space and deciding whether to cull come deployments or just add more gigs to the servers.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

https://redd.it/1c4vo4t
@r_devops