Moving from SysAdmin to DevOps team at my company

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working as a sysadmin at a bank for a little over 2.5 years. My team manages the IT infrastructure. Throughout my time here I’ve been fortunate to develop great relationships with not only the manager of the DevOps team, but the team as a whole. That’s led to me owning the majority of the work the DevOps team needs from mine. I’ve even done a few projects for them, some being in quite a grey area of responsibility, as they were moreso DevOps projects but the team gave me them to help support my career growth (and to have another hand in supporting their efforts).

Let’s call my current manager (SysAdmin director) Jordan and the DevOps manager Marcus.


Marcus and I, especially, have had great rapport for a while. We have similar interests (weightlifting) and have always vibed. Over a year ago he joked about me joining his team at some point.

Now that’s finally happening.

We had a catchup where I directly told him I would love to join his team. He echoed the same sentiment and told me he would like me to be his “lieutenant”. Essentially his 2nd in command. He also shared that he hired someone externally (who I know well) about 6 months ago with the idea that he would fill that role, but unfortunately found that he’s lacking some of the qualities to fill it. Leadership and presence, primarily. Which I understand, as while I genuinely like this person, he is a bit sloppy and I can see him representing the team being an issue.

We’ll be talking specifics about this transition in about a month when he returns from travel. A few questions I have for you more experienced folks on how to approach this…


1. What salary should I target? I expect (and would like) my title to be DevOps engineer. My current title is systems administrator. I make 80k base + 15% bonus. The bonus applies to all employees and is based on company performance, not individual performance. Would it be unreasonable for me to target 100-110k base? I have only 5.5 years of total IT experience and no bachelors degree, which gives me some pause in negotiating.

2. Any tips on navigating this political situation? I’m aiming to minimize damage to my relationship with Jordan, as well as to the relationship between Jordan and Marcus. This is one of Marcus’s primary concerns in the transition, as our teams work closely together.

I really appreciate any guidance here. Thank you!!

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live coding interview - confused

So I just had the second round of interviews in the hiring process and it was really not what I was expecting… I was prepared to write something related to automation, pipelines, IaC but the first question was to write some code that I would expect that a SWE wouldn’t have trouble to come up with a solution. I ran out of time, and moved to the next problem which was a follow-up on the first. I tried really hard to write something and even tried to explain my approach to the problem, but no working code came out at the time. I let the interviewer know that this isn’t something that would be part of the day of a DevOps person and he even agreed but 🤷🏻‍♂️ I’m super sad now because I was really looking forward to work with these folks and I left the call with the feeling that I did horribly bad. That’s it, sorry. I just needed to vent :(

https://redd.it/1dofn9b
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Feeling guilty and useless

A junior being given more and more responsibilities. I don’t usually respond back to pings immediately unless I’m sure of the answer. But it’s all blurring and trying to figure out when I should be taking vacation,how many days (week or two) , and how much is too much.

I have 3/4 certs which I want to get to hit milestones but I am also expecting a baby boy soon in 6 months. How to keep work and life separate?

What are you guys doing to stay on top of things, learning new things without feeling like a dumbass. At what point do you ask for help - currently stuck on something new to me but I’m sure trivial for others. Damn this feeling sucks lol, just looking for advice is it really - how the hell do you manage

https://redd.it/1doi5ae
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How do you measure team performance?

I was at a Platform Engineers meetup and a couple were saying that DORA metrics aren't an accurate way to measure team performance. Okay so I know what not to do, but how do you measure team performance?

https://redd.it/1dojic1
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Do any of you, either directly or indirectly, use any specific techniques (such as The Scientific Method) to solve problems?

Just curious!

https://redd.it/1dol2jz
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Is Divi homepage builder good? Who uses Wordpress?

Someone is using Divi and wordpresss, and don’t think that Nextjs would be more secure.

Is that the same?

https://redd.it/1donqrn
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🚀 Unleash the Power of Automation with My Naukri.com Job Apply Bot! 🖥️💼 | Boost Your Job Search Effortlessly! 😎

👋 Hi dudes!



I’ve made a job apply bot that applies for jobs on Naukri.com. The bot does all the heavy lifting of applying and answering questions during the process using Gemini AI. All you need to do is give it a list of job links you want to apply to. 😎





🔹 How It Works:



1. Reads job links from a CSV file 📄

2. Navigates to each job listing 🖥️

3. Applies if not already applied or expired 📝

4. Uses Gemini AI to answer application questions 💬



🔹 Setup:



1. Install Python & Selenium 🐍

2. Get Geckodriver for Firefox 🦊

3. Configure your paths and profile 📁

4. Run the script and let it handle the rest! 🚀



Ready to give it a try? Check out the link for the full setup guide and script. 🛠️

Github Link: https://github.com/GoliathReaper/JobSailor

Contributions to make the code better are very much welcomed.





https://redd.it/1dopk2p
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What are industry standards on RabbitMQ queues and routing keys?

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to implement a rabbitMQ where I have several different publishers, and several consumers
I am using it as an event bus, so multiple applications are using the same RabbitMQ.

What are industry standards regarding routing keys and queues? I currently have multiple bindings on some queues, which I reuse in my consumer code.
Basically, queue A has 3 bindings 1, 2 and 3. In the consumer code, i listen to the queue, and according to the routing key, I execute one method or another. That sounds weird no?
The problem is that I can't use the shovel plugin to redrive from the DLQ to the main queue (because I lose the routing key, so I don't know which method should execute on consumer side).

How are you guys doing? Are you using one routing key per queue? If so, what's the purpose of routing keys?
Thanks!

https://redd.it/1dobv0z
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One reason why I love Ansible over Puppet over Chef (Salt is somwhere between the latter two)

I need to recreate a lot of environments on regular basis as I am responsible for enabling our SEs and PS staff in terms of devops. As customers could use anything really I try to give them at least the basics of it all.

Anyway, my workflow is MacBook with local Ansible instance > deploy whatever is needed in either AWS or Azure using bash or ansible or mix thereof.

So I automated the deployment (with various client tools like Apache, Certificates and our own agents) so it can be reproduced in a few minutes.

So I just completed automating Ansible, Puppet and Chef with .. well Ansible.

How many lines of code you wonder (if not I tell you anyway)

Chef : 650 lines of Ansible Playbook
Puppet : 220 lines of Ansible Playbook
Ansible : 150 lines of Ansible Playbook


Does not include any AWS / Azure / Bash specific code.

Hate Chef .... Love Ansible ... the contrast is so crazy really (especially in terms of simplicity).

https://redd.it/1dobsqw
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(kubernetes) Are helm release generated certificates less secure than the ones created by cert manager?

Hi,

to illustrate what I mean let's take mongodb-bitnami chart [https://github.com/bitnami/charts/blob/main/bitnami/mongodb/values.yaml](https://github.com/bitnami/charts/blob/main/bitnami/mongodb/values.yaml) `tls:` section is of interest to me.

I want to enable mutual tls between the client and the server(both are in the same kubernetes cluser). I have 2 options on how to do this:

1. Leave `autoGenerated` on `on`

2. Disable auto generation and instead prvide name of the secret generated with cert-manager

sually I'd go with solution 2, but as you can see in the values this chart requires very specific keys inside the secret `\`mongodb-ca-cert\`, \`mongodb-ca-key'`, unfortunately, cert-manager does not provide option to generate secret with non-standard key names. Making some kind of job would be a pain in the ass, seeing how certificates are replaced after a while.
So the question is, is it safe to simply use certs generated by mongo? My first problem is that it seems they never expire, it's just the same certificate forever. Another concert is that it's just fishy to generated ca and cert at the same time and then make client trust it. At this point is that cert even giving me anything?

If anyone has some words of wisdom I'd be grateful if you shared.

https://redd.it/1dowpd3
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Do you know any big DevOps projects?

I'm a beginner and I want to learn by looking through the code of others more experienced than me to see how they approach things. Looking for something that combines kubernetes, cloud and CI/CD (basically lots of devops tools). Found a few projects on GitHub, but they're all too simple (nothing complex or advances, just scratching the surface).
Do you know or have any big devops projects that I can take a look at?

https://redd.it/1doxejx
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Help Needed: Enabling Streaming Responses for AWS Lambda Chatbot built with Flask


Hello everyone,

I’ve been working on developing a chatbot using Flask, and I’m now looking to enable streaming responses. Despite following multiple posts and guides, I haven’t been able to get it to work effectively. I’m considering using AWS Lambda and API Gateway to establish the streaming response functionality.

Has anyone successfully implemented streaming responses in a similar setup? Could you share any resources or guidance on how to achieve this?

Here’s a bit more about my setup:
- Framework: Flask
- Infrastructure: AWS (considering Lambda and API Gateway)

Any step-by-step guides, code snippets, or pointers to useful tutorials would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!



https://redd.it/1dozcry
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How do you build custom cli tools?

EDIT: This is a poll

View Poll

https://redd.it/1dp0ezv
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Tenure-based PTO policies seem like a massive red flag

If you're a company offering tenure-based PTO starting at two weeks and scaling up to four weeks after 15-20 years of service, you're only going to be hiring new graduates and middling experienced employees. You largely shut yourself off not only from the best employees, but also from the experience and lessons learned in the outside industry. Even if you hire high-quality entry-level employees and by some miracle several of them stick around for ten years, they're not going to be as productive as comparable employees with ten years of diverse work experience. And these policies which presumably are meant to retain employees are almost certainly only going to retain the lowest quality employees as the others can find gainful employment with dramatically better PTO (and almost invariably better pay) anywhere else in the industry.

This has been my experience when I worked for a tenure-based PTO company fresh out of school, and this is why I regard tenure-based PTO policies as a massive red flag when applying for jobs--even if I was willing to take a huge pay cut and a huge PTO cut to work on interesting problems, I can be reasonably certain that I'm going to be working in a sub-par environment with wildly outdated software development tools and practices under management that is actively fostering that environment.

I'm curious what others think--am I way off base? Or does this align with your experiences?

https://redd.it/1dp16vj
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Nobody cares about your AWS certification

Got an email from someone today with so many AWS certificate icons in their signature I had to scroll over to the right to see them all. This is ridiculous and in my opinion, only serves to stroke the ego of this person. I get it though, maybe there's a more prestigious handful you'd like to display and that's fine but nobody cares that you passed your introductory certification proving that you know what S3, EC2, and a VPC is...

https://redd.it/1dp3x3y
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Suggestions for High-Level or complex DevOps Projects to Deepen My Knowledge?

I'm diving deeper into DevOps and looking for some challenging project ideas to learn about technologies, I'm interested in working on something complex that will push me to learn and grow, my problem is I can pick up tools on their own but can't integrate them to make a complex working system.

I'm looking for project ideas that involve building complex systems, helping me develop skills and understand the integration of various tools and technologies. I'd love to hear your suggestions for challenging projects that require significant research and problem-solving. Ideally, these projects should push me to learn a lot and think deeply about the solutions. Thanks in advance for your ideas!

https://redd.it/1dp5l59
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A fully free alternative to Ansible for android?

omething like ansible but for Android devices? For free

There's the android enterprise management, but at a first glance it seems to be all paid, you need to subscribe to a certified provider with closed doors pricing and feature

https://redd.it/1dp6ykh
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NEXT STEPS FOR CAREER

Hey Guys,

I got about 3 years of experience in a SWE position and have a CS degree. In those years I dealt with surface level Jenkins and had a superb time with it. I want to learn more about DevOps and potentially make a position change to a more DevOps related position.

What would be the best steps to learn modern DevOps, what should I learn first. I am in mobile development, so AWS stuff isn't as applicable to me.

https://redd.it/1dp7ha4
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Azure web app cannot resolve Azure VM hostname

I have a web app and need it to resolve the hostname of an Azure server. When I go to console and tcpping the hostname, I get a host such host message. Both are part of the same VNet and are in the same location. I have the DNS server listed in the VNet. It will resolve with the FQDN but I need the short name to also resolve. Any ideas?

https://redd.it/1dp9ze6
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Go microservice/CICD project ideas

Hey all,


I'm looking for some good Golang project ideas where I could demonstrate my skills with building a Go microservice or some kind of CI/CD automation for my github portfolio.

I'm recently laid off, but I have 6 years of experience as a Devops / SRE professional, but due to the nature of my work I have unfortunately been limited in scope and time which prevented from growing my skills on the job. The old company still had me managing Jenkins and vsphere, fml and good riddance. Some context have experience in AWS, Gitlab, Datadog, and Terraform.


Let me know if you guys have any ideas with regards to some problem in your current position you wish you could solve with Go, or just a good project idea which could highlight my skills. Much appreciated.


https://redd.it/1dpb026
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What CDN fits this use case?

We have an e-commerce site with a long tail of xx,xxx product pages. Many of these pages are visited infrequently, but when they do get visited, we need them to be performant.

The application is built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel. The pages are statically generated at build time.

Vercel provides their own CDN, but it evicts items from the cache for being accessed infrequently, and their definition of infrequently is if the item “only” gets requested once per day, for example. It doesn’t seem like you can change the cache expiration time. So that doesn’t seem to be a good fit.

I’ve read that AWS Cloudfront provides more control over the cache expiration time, but unless I was reading outdated information, it doesn’t seem to perform well with manual purges. We deploy pretty frequently at times, so being able to purge and repopulate the cache quickly is a feature we’re looking for.

I’ve also read about Fastly, but my understanding is that it’s super expensive, and I wasn’t able to get a hold of anybody when I reached out to them with questions.

Is there a better approach to this, or another CDN I should be looking at? Or maybe I’m wrong in some of this analysis?

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

https://redd.it/1dpacb3
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