Devops Interview Prep

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to prepare for Devops Interview and I have a question, how do guys prepare for Terraform? I mean obviously you don't create Infra on a daily basis in your organization? How do you keep up with the new content and get yourself ready for the interview for Terraform related questions? Any particular resource/topics you refer before the interview?

https://redd.it/1ef4mhs
@r_devops

How do you conduct an interview for a Devops role?

I have to conduct an interview for a DevOps role that heavily involves AWS. I want to know from the community how you judge if someone is really good at doing DevOps stuff. What questions do you generally ask?

https://redd.it/1eezql1
@r_devops

Senior Engineer, but don't know how to code

I have 9 years of professional linux admin experience, I'm not junior.

I have a legitimately high ranking title and respect of my peers that I've earned through regular promotions at my company that I've worked at for 5 years. I'm the senior-most member of my team of 11, of that group, only 2 has a 'real' software engineering background. It's just not what we do for the most part.


My responsibilities for my entire career have been entirely oriented around infrastructure, devops and SRE. I've gotten quite good in my domain, and with light scripting. I'll do Ansible, Chef, and 'easy' bash and python. I know enough about Golang and have contributed useful fixes to Go projects. I can tell you basically everything about python and Go syntax after years of immersion and reading of code. I can discuss software engineering with real devs all day and convince you I know what I'm doing. I've just never meaningfully built anything myself and have no muscle memory for it.


With all of that said, I don't know how to code at all beyond \~300 line python scripts to do simple tasks. Frankly, I don't want to become a 'real' software engineer, but I consistently feel bad about not being able to contribute more. ChatGPT has actually helped me a ton with this and getting better, but It's not enough.

==

A specific problem I'm facing right now is developing short-term tooling to manage bare-metal datacenter hardware. I have \~2000 of servers running a stack that I own across many sites that exhibit near constant failures for one reason or another and I want to fix it. I've taken several stabs now at developing a controller that watches hardware and attempts to remediate through our PXE boot server and eventually filing Jira tickets for the DC team to inspect issues that cannot be fixed by just re-installing the server. This involves a fair bit of state management involving human input by DC techs, ensuring the servers are truly offline. What about partial failures. Many types of hardware failures. What about transient failures because the DC as a whole is having issues: I can't just nuke everything in this case. It really is a hard problem with high stakes.


What I have is an unreliable hodgepodge of scripts that are disparate and frankly don't work well. It's a surprisingly difficult problem since failure modes are myriad, humans are in the loop of remediation, the PXE booter is extremely unreliable and risk is high of making the situation worse.
I just don't really know how to write code enough in such a way to solve this problem. The problem is far beyond anything else I've made myself.

==

A lot of this is mental, I just have had zero formal education in computer science or software engineering and have gotten pretty far just figuring things out as I need to, which just often hasn't involved writing more complex pieces of software myself.

Compromising me here is knowing any tool I make is going to be solely supported by myself, will only be short-term as there is a separate project to completely overhaul the way infrastructure is managed that will obsolete whatever I build. That overhaul will not be complete for another 1-2 years.

It's also just a lot of effort. I've been extremely stressed lately for work, personal and immigration reasons. While 9 years might not sound like a lot in the grand scheme of things, I'm close to early retirement and could do it in 3-4 years if nothing stupid happens at current rates. Frankly I'm tired of my career and just want to retire already. I have zero passion for software engineering.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I wanted to write it out. It sounds a lot like whining reading it back, but I burned the candle from both ends for 9 years to get where I am today.

Maybe I just move into management if my current boss leaves and never worry about it again.
tldr I'm facing new problems I don't know how to deal with, and am conflicted
\- I'm not a full time SWE and

wasn't hired to be one
\- It's a lot of time and effort I just don't have anymore
\- Is it even worth the effort if I had it
\- Chance of failure is high
\- Chance of wasted effort is high
\- Sense of embarrassment about asking for help on something your average swe intern could do better than me. Don't want to waste the time of others.

​

I don't know how to learn to code something that's meaningfully complex involving state machines. This isn't just a crud api with a tutorial to follow.

https://redd.it/1ef82hq
@r_devops

How i switched to devops after 9 years working as Linux support engineer

2.5 year back I was 31 years old and had successfully wasted nine years of my career stuck at IBM doing mediocre work with a significantly lower salary.

I had come from an NIT and was stuck in this level of work while my college mates climbed the success ladders. Some worked in the USA/UK, some went onsite, and others enjoyed senior-level positions at big companies and all the shiny glamour of a successful career.

I was working on a Platform support role, which people looked at with pity.

I was working the night shift and providing on-call support on weekends. I had no work-life balance, and my health was getting worse due to lack of sleep.

I was stuck in a horrible comfort zone, scared of the change. Imposter syndrome and a severe lack of self-worth were constant companions, and I had zero confidence in myself.

To make matters worse, I got married. I was under a lot of presure financially and started getting panic attacks due to the fear of getting laid off, as I lacked the skills to do anything other than support work.

After many sleepless nights, I realized something.

If you will change nothing, nothing will change.
I decided to make a career switch to Devops as it was something related to work I have been doing for years as Linux and Aix support engineer.

I started researching online about the devops roadmap, and it was no help as all the posts talked about learning a plethora of tools, and learning all of them felt impossible.

So I turned to YouTube to find better guidance for devops and stumbled upon a channel, Techworld with Nana. It was good and gave me some confidence.

I decided to focus on essential tools for devops and mastering them.

One cloud platform — I choose AWS
One infrastructue as code tool — Terraform
Linux and docker
Version control tools — Git and GitHub
One CICD tool — Github actions
Scripting — Python
I started deep-diving into the above topics by watching YouTube videos and reading medium blogs on all these topics.

I followed the resources and did a lot of hands-on with these tools. I also went through AWS and Terraform documentation.

After one month of hard work, I started getting some confidence.

I realized that if I needed to get some real-world working experience. I spoke to a few of my friends who worked as devops engineers. I asked them about their day-to-day work and the kinds of work they do.

As per their suggestions, I created multiple projects to practice.

Deploy a 3-tier architecture on AWS with Terraform.
Deploy a sample flask project into ec2 instances using docker and GitHub Actions.
Deploy Lambda function to send weekly reports.
Managing s3 buckets with CLI commands.
Deploying a Flask API in AWS ECS with Terraform.
They also suggested I learn Kubernetes.

I spent another 1-month doing hands-on lab and learning Kubernetes along with that.

By the end of 2 months, I was confident to start giving interviews. I did some research and updated my resume.

I wanted to make my resume stand out, so I used Canva for predesigned resume templates and built a professional-looking resume.

I also understood that I cannot switch to devops without showing any relevant experience.

I added 2.5 years of devops experience and curated the devops experience using my friend's resumes.

I updated my LinkedIn and Naukri profiles. After one week, I started getting a lot of calls for various roles around devops.

I crapped my pants in the first few interviews as they asked the question that only an experienced devops engineer would answer.

I did not let it discourage me, as I knew it would happen. I used the questions the interviewers asked and prepared for the topics around them in depth.

After three/four interviews, I started getting better.

Shortly, I received two offer letters from relatively small companies.

I continued giving more interviews and got three more offer letters from reputed companies. I used these offer letters and negotiated a good package(2.5x of my current CTC).

I resigned from IBM and joined

after serving the notice period.

It changed my life completely. I had everything.

A handsome salary with a bunch of great benefits.
Respected designation at a reputed company.
Day working hours, free weekends, and work-life balance.
Confidence, self-worth, and motivation to do more.
I am inspired to take my career to another level.

https://redd.it/1efa2vk
@r_devops

You think you know pain?

Pain is importing 30 + AWS accounts into terraform from scratch, that have been click-opsed to hell for years..

Better late than never

https://redd.it/1efao9i
@r_devops

Has anyone heard of blackbird for API development?

I like to watch some of the videos TFiR puts out cause sometimes they uncover some early days/lesser known tools that end up being pretty cool. I saw this one they put out a few days ago on this tool called Blackbird for API development. I did some digging and it looks like it's still in beta (but free) once you sign up? Has anyone here played around with it yet for API spec generation or testing?

Here's the video I was referencing:
https://youtu.be/hb\_V54E0B78

https://redd.it/1efbr8f
@r_devops

Platform Engineering roles advertised as DevOps engineering?

I'm currently on the jobs market due to being made redundant (team was moved to a cheaper employment market) and I've noticed that a huge portion of the "DevOps Engineer" roles are more like platform engineering roles. They'll be basically "manage this public cloud infra" and nothing to do with CI\\CD, let alone the DevOps lifecycle.

My current (well, former now I guess...) role had me managing CI\\CD platforms, implementing best practices around testing, binary controls and security scanning, making sure there were good feedback loops into Jira from testing and maybe a little bit of system admin around making sure legacy build infrastructure was kept ticking along.

As a result, I'm actually not cloud orientated. I just wasn't trained in it as that was the cloud ops teams area. I worked with them plenty, but it wasn't my area. We were meant to get some formal training so we could better help or have better input but it was delayed and delayed. I suspect my team had been put forward for the chopping block, so they never bothered.

Sure, I can agree that platform engineering can be part of the DevOps lifecycle, if it's regarding deployments, but that's different to "Manage this cloud infra from the bottom up".

https://redd.it/1efa843
@r_devops

AWS vs GCP vs Azure

I was wondering which cloud platform to start learning with. Like from ease of use perspective, handling complexities, etc.

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

“We just signed a 12 month contract for this service so you have to use it”

Why don’t product teams and leadership ever conceptualize the sunk cost fallacy and that it will be ever harder to move away from a service once you invest more and more engineering hours into it?

https://redd.it/1efi2y4
@r_devops

Best Practice for Docker and Kubernetes Deployment

What's the best practice for creating pipelines from GitHub to Docker registries to cloud Kubernetes clusters?

Like pushing to the GitHub repo triggers a Docker image push?

https://redd.it/1efi25o
@r_devops

I accidentally discovered devops and now I'm hooked, what to do next ?

I've been learning to code for a while, mainly focusing on web dev, using the usual suspects, Typescript, Next js etc. When it came to making a portfolio I decided to try self hosting as it was cheaper and seemed to make sense.

During this, I of course found out what goes into making a simple ubuntu server be capable of safely hosting applications and I really enjoyed it! I enjoyed learning linux, docker, nginx, GitHub actions, watchtower, it was great.

Now, for the next step I'm thinking sign up and get the free AWS/Azure setup and see what happens, I'd also like to learn some python to do another application with a React frontend, python backend and host it again but trying to utilise more concepts (Kubernetes for example).

Any suggestions would be great, or I'd be interested in other people's story if anybody was in a similar situation.

https://redd.it/1efo7ly
@r_devops

Free devops course

If anyone needs a free devops course, I have got a link

https://redd.it/1efpkr2
@r_devops

BunkerWeb - The open-source and next-gen Web Application Firewall (WAF)

BunkerWeb is a next-generation and open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Being a full-featured web server (based on [NGINX](https://nginx.org/) under the hood), it will protect your web services to make them "secure by default". BunkerWeb integrates seamlessly into your existing environments ([Linux](https://docs.bunkerweb.io/1.5.9/integrations/?utm_campaign=self&utm_source=github#linux), [Docker](https://docs.bunkerweb.io/1.5.9/integrations/?utm_campaign=self&utm_source=github#docker), [Swarm](https://docs.bunkerweb.io/1.5.9/integrations/?utm_campaign=self&utm_source=github#swarm), [Kubernetes](https://docs.bunkerweb.io/1.5.9/integrations/?utm_campaign=self&utm_source=github#kubernetes), …) and is fully configurable (don't panic, there is an [awesome web UI](https://docs.bunkerweb.io/1.5.9/web-ui/?utm_campaign=self&utm_source=github) if you don't like the CLI) to meet your own use-cases . In other words, cybersecurity is no more a hassle.

BunkerWeb contains primary [security features](https://docs.bunkerweb.io/1.5.9/security-tuning/?utm_campaign=self&utm_source=github) as part of the core but can be easily extended with additional ones thanks to a [plugin system](https://docs.bunkerweb.io/1.5.9/plugins/?utm_campaign=self&utm_source=github).


Links :

* Website : [https://www.bunkerweb.io](https://www.bunkerweb.io)
* GitHub : [https://github.com/bunkerity/bunkerweb](https://github.com/bunkerity/bunkerweb)
* Documentation : [https://docs.bunkerweb.io](https://docs.bunkerweb.io)

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

Exploring GCP offer to migrate from AWS

As the title suggests, after discussions with GCP we've been offered a chunk of credits & they will also cover the bill of their consulting partner to do the migration over 4 months.. but rather than a lift and shift they will do all the platform modernisations we've had lined up in our roadmap and resolve our tech debt with infra, IaC, monitoring, CICD etc.. I did take this to AWS and they've said they can't pay someone to be hands on, we'd have to pay for advice on guidance on how to reach our cost efficiency and platform efficiency goals, we don't lack the technical knowhow it's more a lack of resource alongside our regular BAU and project work to prioritise modernising the platform


I guess my main concern is anything I might've missed when doing due diligence? I can't see anything that AWS necessarliy has that GCP doesn't ofc there is stuff like SES but we don't use that anyway & we already use BigQuery in GCP.. just hoping to hear from unbiased views hence me asking AWS vs GCP in here rather than one of the dedicated communities.. I know K8s would be a benefit of GCP but we only use ECS at the minute, K8 would be overkill, so we will be using Cloud Run in GCP

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

Winget Validate Issue

Hi all, I'm looking out for helpful solutions I can try for fixing my problem.
Actually, I'm trying to add a CLI tool into the winget-pkg repository so that it can be used by every windows user from the terminal itself.
I already have structured my manifest the way it is supposed to be, as provided in the official Microsoft Winget Manifest Schema. (Installer.yaml + Version.yaml + defaultLocal.yaml)
However, whenever I try to run - "winget validate ." to validate all the yaml files in my manifest folder from CMD, it gives me the following error (1):

Manifest validation failed.

C:\\__w\\1\\s\\external\\pkg\\src\\AppInstallerSharedLib\\Yaml.cpp(252)\\WindowsPackageManager.dll!00007FFA9F3ED5CF: (caller: 00007FFA9F42F23B) Exception(1) tid(5900) 8A150022

And when I try to validate single files like- "winget validate Version.yaml" or "winget validate defaultLocale.yaml" it gives me the error (2):

Manifest validation failed.

Manifest Error: The multi file manifest is incomplete. A multi file manifest must contain at least version, installer and defaultLocale manifest. File: version.yaml

error(3) for defaultLocale.yaml:
Manifest validation failed.

Manifest Error: The multi file manifest is incomplete. A multi file manifest must contain at least version, installer and defaultLocale manifest. File: defaultLocale.yaml


1.

Note that when I run "winget validate installer.yaml" I get the error (1):

Manifest validation failed.

C:\\__w\\1\\s\\external\\pkg\\src\\AppInstallerSharedLib\\Yaml.cpp(252)\\WindowsPackageManager.dll!00007FFA9F3ED5CF: (caller: 00007FFA9F42F23B) Exception(1) tid(5900) 8A150022


2.

My CLI tool is a .exe file. And I have already added it to the Github Releases. Along with that, I have changed the InstallerURL to that release aswell.

Thank you for reading all that out :)

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

Should I lie about having Azure experience?

Hello, currently have about 5YOE working with AWS as a Cloud/DevOps engineer and got laid off a while back. I've taken a fair bit of time to get my head into Azure and completed AZ-104 and also AZ-305. Currently where I am based the market for AWS engineers is quite poor and there is a significant demand for Azure engineers.

I am beyond positive that I could perform well and interview well in an Azure role with the knowledge I have, but not recruiter/HR person will put me through as a candidate as I have less than a year of Azure experience.

Nobody really bothers with reference checks so I am considering just saying I worked with Azure instead of AWS at my last 2 jobs so that I can get my foot in an interview. Good idea or bad?

https://redd.it/1efw7io
@r_devops

Resume got selected twice but no interview scheduled within 2 months

I have this incident yesterday, I really wanted to join this company and my resume got selected twice but after the initial HR interview (where we exchange why you wanna join, tell me about yourself, and this is what company do....bla bla bla), but every time this HR...after taking this interview says "Unfortunately we will not be able to move with your profile".


I don't understand then why they selected me every time and...after initial call they say NO.

https://redd.it/1efs60z
@r_devops

GPU-Accelerated Containers for Deep Learning

A technical overview on how to set up GPU-accelerated Docker containers with NVIDIA GPUs. The guide covers essential requirements and explores two approaches: using pre-built CUDA wheels for Python frameworks and creating comprehensive CUDA development environments with PyTorch built from source:
https://martynassubonis.substack.com/p/gpu-accelerated-containers-for-deep

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

Entering the Coding Industry

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for some advice on entering the coding industry. I was hoping to reach out to professionals with advice and experience, all else I've found have been ads trying to sell me bootcamps or courses. If there's anyone out there who's willing to let me pick their brain and get their perspective I would greatly appreciate it.

To put it into perspective I'm a 29 YO with no prior professional coding experience, I've dabbled with python and html but I'm really interested in seeing if I might be able to change my career path and do something with code. I've heard that front end work has the lowest wall of entry, so I've been looking there but I'm open to all disciplines. I just want to know if it's a smart move to dedicate the proper time to learn the work and the industry. The following are some questions I have if any of you fine gals or guys would grace me with your experience and advice.

(1) Is front end coding really a good niche to work toward as a beginner?

(2) Is there any validity to these coding bootcamps as it pertains to the education required to land a job?

(3) What is the consensus as far as AI, is it a realistic threat to the job market in the upcoming decade?

(4) How challenging is it to land a full time position, is it as simple as bootcamps make it sound or is it very competitive?

(5) can anyone with prior experience vouch for a career change into this industry as a realistic goal?

(6) What level of mastery or understanding does it take to do the work professionally, and how much time should be taken to skill up to that level?

Again I sincerely appreciate any feedback you guys have. I just want a realistic picture of what it takes, and what the opportunities and possibilities actually looks like.




https://redd.it/1eg2of9
@r_devops