What should I learn/get certified in?

Hi,

I’ve been in DevOps since 2021, where I started by mastering Kubernetes, and quickly earned my AWS Solutions Architect Associate and CKAD certifications. I’m proficient in bash scripting, Python, Terraform, and Ansible, and have been dabbling in Golang during my free time. At this point, I’m essentially functioning as a senior engineer.

Recently, my company laid off 75% of my team, and I haven’t been assigned any substantial projects since. I’m preparing for the possibility of getting laid off myself and don’t want to be caught off guard without a backup plan.

I’m trying to figure out what to learn or get certified in next to stay competitive. I’ve considered going multi-cloud with Azure/GCP certifications or renewing my CKAD by going for CKA or Terraform certifications. I’d appreciate any advice or suggestions on the best path forward!

https://redd.it/1fzqr2p
@r_devops

Best practices for tracking and auditing software packages

Hey /r/devops,

We're trying to track and audit the software packages our developers use. We have a process in place for third-party software, but this process seems cumbersome for packages, as packages are being installed daily and we do not want to slow down development work.

What does this subreddit recommend?

https://redd.it/1fzrl7f
@r_devops

Need advice on replacement stacks for Cacti

I am finally getting around to looking at replacing Cacti as my statistics collection system. The stats I currently collect are done via snmp and scripts that scrape for the data I need. My requirements are pretty simple: capture time series data of sensors and counters, and be able to graph them easily. I'd also like the solution to be fairly lightweight; I'm monitoring a bunch of stuff in my house, I don't need things like enterprise replication.

Evaluating the modern ecosystem, it seems like Grafana may be what I'm looking for, possibly with InfluxDB and Telegraf. I want to continue leveraging the scripts I'm currently using for grabbing data, so the solution should have a fairly easy way to allow me to feed it time series data.

What else should I be looking at? Thank you.

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

Advice needed: GitHub Actions monitoring

I need some advice and feedback as we’re building a DevOps tool to provide monitoring, reporting and insights into GitHub Actions CI pipeline performance.

It's basically identifies anomalies (such as duration and success rate deviations), and tracks key North Star CI metrics like MTTR and throughput to help optimize development cycle.

Initially we built this tool for internal use because CI pipelines were often overlooked and hurting productivity across the team. After feeling it helped, we turned it into a product. I sometimes wonder if we’ve been a bit blind to other needs, maybe we designed it too closely around our own cases. We hope it’s not just us thinking it’s useful:))

Well some features are like getting real-time visibility into GitHub Action pipelines, tracking durations, failures and all that good stuff in live charts. It gives actionable insights like actual recommendations when things slow down, too much incerase or fail. With CubeScore(this is something we invent:P )-it's like DORA Metrics but for CI, I can see how my pipelines stack up against elite teams and industry benchmarks.

After trying to get feedback from people with DevOps experience in this subreddit through chats without success, we decided to ask for advice here with some questions :) :

1. Currently, it send weekly health check email on pipelines. We are planning to add real time alerts & notifications for pipeline failures, slowdowns etc. in app and with in on email/slack(I'm not sure if we need to add Teams integration). Would this be usefull?
2. Do you think the North Start metrics and the features I mentioned are truly useful, or are there any other metrics you’d recommend for CI optimization?
3. We’ve thought about adding a feature to predict GitHub Actions costs but since GitHub pricing varies across organizations and maybe teams might care more about CI health than direct cost, so we held off on adding it for now. What do you think about it?
4. We only have GitHub actions integration. Do you think it make sense to include Jenkins, GitLab, or Azure as well? GitLab maybe a good option because many companies uses as self-hosted and we can share our Helm chart.

Live demo(no-signup required): https://s.cicube.io/demo

We connected React.js GitHub repo for the live demo.

Home page: https://cicube.io/

(I know the home page need UI improvements, we just want make it quick as possible for now:D)

Thanks in advance fo your advices on any part of the app.




https://redd.it/1fzud7r
@r_devops

Alternatives for Datadog "Browser" Synthetic Tests

I'm using Datadog's Browser Synthetic Testing functionality to measure LCP, TTI, etc on various web workflows. The tests are not simple API or even page load tests. They run through user login, navigation, and test for specific HTML elements on a page. Some of them measure specific Ajax calls made by client side scripts on the pages.


Are there alternatives to Datadog for this type of functionality?

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

oh noo.. we've lost our scrum master... much sad...

</s>

No clue how things will progress from here.... we have 40 some odd devs in teams of 3-5.. that's a lot of teams and a lot of processes that could go 10 different ways. Doesn't help that these teams are from 4 different companies that were merged into one big mess that we're still trying to untangle.

I'm hopeful that most of the devs will start working toward thinner/faster and maybe take up some interest in owning their own 'devopsy' stuff.

Any advice to the guy who will likely end up having to deal with any mess this creates? ;-)

&#x200B;

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

What Did You Wish You'd Automated Sooner?

Hi everyone,
I've been reflecting on my journey in our field and had an interesting thought: there are often tasks we do manually for a long time before realizing they could be automated. I'm curious about your experiences with this.

Have you ever had any of these moments:

1. Automating a process later in your career and thinking, "I wish I'd done this years ago!"?

2. Discovering that a task you thought had to be manual actually had an automation solution?

3. Finding a way to fully automate something you'd only partially automated before?

4. Implementing an automation solution that made you wonder how you ever lived without it?

I'd love to hear your stories. Maybe your experiences could help someone else spot an automation opportunity they've been missing.

Thanks for sharing!

https://redd.it/1fzxs19
@r_devops

Learning C to become a better DevOps Engineer?

Hi All,

I know Python to a reasonable level. I can write automation scripts, and understand roughly what some code is doing if you give it to me. Nothing to impressive, but I know enough.

I've been thinking recently that I might want to pick up a programming language that really dives deep into the lower layers of computing. Something like C where you deal with memory management, system calls, etc.

My thought process is that if I can learn C and become quite good with it. It would make me better with Linux, It would make me better at security, Networking, etc.

However, is it a bit excessive? Would I be dumping a large chunk of time into learning C and not see much return.
I know this is a "how long is a piece of string question". But what are your opinions with learning a programming language making you a much better DevOps Engineer?

https://redd.it/1fzwl27
@r_devops

I'm lost everytime the Senior Engineers talk about Active Directory, authentication, OAuth, etc.

What is the best place to learn about these things on the side?

https://redd.it/1g01i0o
@r_devops

Advice on landing a Entry DevOps role as a Developer looking to make a career change

Hey guys, I am currently working as a Full-stack software developer for nearly 2 years now, before that, I have been messing around and building projects for some time as well.


Mainly working with .NET, Vue, SQL, HTML/CSS etc


I found myself enjoying the DevOps side of things much more, to the point where I'm spending pretty much all of my free time after work and weekends dedicated to building theoretical knowledge and applying it into existing web applications I've built.


I do not feel or have the same amount passion for Software development, I really enjoy learning about all the various tools that's used within the DevOps space and applying them where I can.


I currently have knowledge in Kubernetes, Docker/Docker Compose, Azure, Azure Devops, Jenkins, Terraform, Linux, Helm and some other tools like Ingress controllers, messed around with Istio Service Mesh a bit.


I've been building on these skills by implementing the DevOps process into an existing application, starting from an Ubuntu VPS with a single node kubeadm cluster, Jenkins, Bash scripting, to moving to a Managed/Cloud Infrastructure using AKS, Azure DevOps etc.


I feel this really taught me so much and I'm constantly adding onto this every day.. Finding out how to provision everything securely using Terraform and Azure, going to also start looking into Ansible and see how to apply that into my project.



I just wanted to come on here and ask you guys for ANY sort of advice on just landing a starting role in the field, don't really care that much about the pay for now. As long as I can do something I find more interest in.


I know it's not really an entry level field, but I am willing to put in the effort to land something.


What could I do to stand out ? Where I'm from there's really not many opportunities for Junior roles which makes me demotivated at times, not knowing If even after all my efforts, I'll even get a chance to switch to the field and gain professional experience..



https://redd.it/1g03aly
@r_devops

Best practices question - deploying staging to production?

We're a web development shop. LAMP stack, mostly WordPress but a fair bit of custom work as well.

A client of ours runs a sort of ERP system they built on WordPress. Not perhaps the best approach but that's for another day. They have enough employees actively using this that we need to be extra careful when deploying changes, and give ourselves an easy rollback solution.

The strategy we're using is two AWS EC2 instances, one under a "staging" subdomain and the other the production server, along with two RDS database servers, one with the staging db and one with production. A load balancer routes the staging subdomain to one instance and production to the other. WordPress on each instance has two database configurations, depending on what the request URI is. If it's the staging URL we use the staging database, and if not we use production.

We deploy to staging using git. When the staging instance is fully tested we run a script to tell the load balancer to "swap instances", now pointing the live URL at what was the staging instance and vice versa. The newly live (formerly staging) instance now points at the production database (due to the dual database configs) and the newly staging (formerly live) instance now points at the staging db. We can easily roll back by running the "swap" script again.

It's quick and easy and _seems_ safe enough. Is it? Or am I crazy, and we're missing something that's going to smack us some day?

https://redd.it/1g05uvn
@r_devops

Best strategy for syncing certificates across multiple servers: Google Drive, Git repo, manual, or REST service?

I'm working with a web service that requires a certificate for secure communication. The issue is that I have multiple servers (about 5) running different operating systems (some Windows, others Linux), and I need to update the certificate across all of them when it changes. Recently, I updated the certificate on some servers but forgot the others, which caused failures.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to sync the certificate across all the servers without running into this issue again. Here are the options I'm considering:

1. Google Drive or similar: Upload the certificate to a shared location like Google Drive, and have each server download it periodically.
2. Git repo with automatic pull: Store the certificate in a Git repo, and set up the servers to pull the latest version at regular intervals.
3. Manual updates: Keep a list of all the servers and update the certificate manually on each one whenever it's needed.
4. Centralized REST service: Build a REST service that handles the communication with the web service and centralizes the certificate, so I only need to update it in one place.

What would be the best approach in terms of security, scalability, and ease of maintenance? I'd appreciate any advice or insights!

https://redd.it/1g08lb9
@r_devops

Can I make extra income knowing only html and css?

I'm just starting out in this area and I only feel confident with html and css at the moment.

https://redd.it/1g09rsq
@r_devops

Getting my butt kicked right now and I can use some help.

Hello!

I am not a devops engineer by title but I aspire to one day get to that level. I am currently being humbled in a pretty serious manner. I have built the outline for a devops workflow at my company. I have most everything working (On-prem GitLab, Automated deployments etc). I am running into some difficulty with getting a working Docker Container with all of the necessary dependencies. The app team is building in php and is using php-sqlsrv in their code to connect to Microsoft SQL Servers. My initial working test code was built on php:apache-bulseye and works fine but I am out of my depth once all of the dependencies are thrown in the mix.


I am going to be reaching out to some outside help because I don't want to be the roadblock for the team but I also wish to learn more. I have a collection of developers building things right now and I don't have a way to deploy their code. They are adding in more dependencies and drivers that I don't have built into my container. I am pretty sure that I can research and dig my way out of this but I have some deadlines to contend with (also devops isn't really my job).

I am sure this is probably a trivial solution that I am just not experienced enough with containers yet to know.

https://redd.it/1g0az4b
@r_devops

Does your management check if you go back to office?

Even if you deliver your work, do they complain that you are not back to office. What to deal with this nonsense?

https://redd.it/1g0dtj0
@r_devops

All you need to know about Grafana Loki!

We have been working with Loki for a while now at KubeNine. Elasticsearch was really painful to and expensive to manage for customers when the use case was just logging.

When Loki came we were super excited and took it for a spin. Here's a blog that we have created to put forth our learnings on Loki - these learnings have helped us scale Loki for our clients!

Do let us know your feedback.

https://www.kubeblogs.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-loki/



https://redd.it/1g0bhhb
@r_devops

What tools should I use to setup a portable CI/CD pipeline for four repositories towards a single VPS?

Hey folks, I'm currently part of an open source club at my college and recently I convinced our members to move and streamline all of our infrastructure to a single VPS (it's currently hosted all over the place across different IAAS's and PAAS's and is a pain in the ass to manage and troubleshoot)

While I do run a homelab and have some minor experience with GitHub actions and docker, I'm pretty new to devops and automating stuff. My current approach with one of my personal projects is to run a GitHub action which SSH's into my homelab and runs a few commands to pull the changes and restart the service.

The nginx configs, envs and systemd services were all written by hand and while I could do this for the club projects, it feels quite inefficient and ideally I would like a system which we can quickly migrate to a different VPS if the need arises.

I've done some research but I'm quite confused with which combination of tools is best suited for this job, initially my plan was to dockerise all the projects and create a GH action which builds the containers and pushes it to a registry. I would run watchtower on the VPS (which i would setup using Ansible) to detect these pushes and automatically update the containers but then I saw in the watchtower readme that it is not meant to be used in production environments, and they instead suggest to use Kubernetes which is something I'm not sure I require since I only have a single server.

While I know my needs aren't quite "production" worthy, I would like to use the right tool for the job and learn something useful in the process. Does it make sense to learn Kubernetes for this and does my initial approach make any sense or do I need to go and do some more research? Any pointers are appreciated!

https://redd.it/1g0fhr3
@r_devops

Getting into a Devops as a FullStack developer

As the title says, I have been working as a Full-stack web/Mobile developer for 3+ years, I want to try something new, so I choose Devops for my next transition. I worked primarily on Golang & Node.js. There are a lot of tools available for DevOps but still, I'm not sure how to start from. I don't like to watch videos for countless hours for learning, so kindly recommend project-based courses, blogs, or any articles that would help. I appreciate your valuable comment.

https://redd.it/1g0ez3r
@r_devops

30 Days Of CNCF Projects | Day 3: What is KEDA + Demo ↔️

Hey all! 👋

I’ve just published a new video for my project 30 Days of CNCF Projects, and this one’s all about KEDA – Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler! In this video series, I’m diving each week for another CNCF project.

In the video, I cover:

1. What KEDA is
2. How it works
3. A live demo + a workshop to try it yourself

Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlrEXJdEc5w

This is part of my 30 Days of CNCF Projects series, where I explore different CNCF tools to help us solve real-world cloud-native challenges. Would love to get your feedback on the video and hear if anyone here has worked with KEDA! 🚀

Looking forward to your thoughts! 😃

If you want to help me promote this promote, I will be grateful for it.

Like, share, subscribe & connect me on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/guy-menahem/

https://redd.it/1g0f5an
@r_devops

todegree or not todegree?

Hello everyone, I'm 19 yo, I've been studying CS for quite a while now, Built some fullstack projects and have a decent understanding of the basics and still learning more and still have a lot to learn.

Now I'm stuck between going to collage or not,

If I started going to collage
1 - I would have to work full time, to pay fees.
2 - More work mean less study time, I used to work full time for a long period of time and managing work study time is always hard, like it would be great if studied 1 hour a day.
3 - I'm living in 3rd world country and the education system is dog shit I will just go there for the degree since its mostly required and I will have harder time finding job without it.

If I didn't
1 - currently I'm studying 4-6hrs a day, the internet is full of CS studying materials, And so far I'm doing great.
2 - I could learn faster therefor build more projects and this could get me a job and prevent time loss.
3 - I may have harder time finding a job science it mostly require a degree

I hope someone with more experience help me through this.

https://redd.it/1g0mdmr
@r_devops

Do you store secrets in environment variables?

Surely, all the tutorials and user docs across tools use code examples like `process.env.OPENAI_TOKEN` and other such examples. So yeah, it is pretty common and it also easily spills to developer projects.

How do you manage these secrets in your team projects? how do you balance a solution to the problem that is both secure but also provides nice DX to developers and doesn't antagonize them?

I wrote a very lengthy blog post about all the reasons I could think of to COMPLETELY AVOID secrets in env vars and my proposed approach. Happy to learn what you all are doing in practice and how to improve on my go-to best practices.

https://redd.it/1g0muvv
@r_devops