DevOps Job market 2025 Event Audio

Hey Folks,

As many of you requested we did record 2025 DevOps Job Market event I hope our community will find this type of events useful. If anybody wants to speak on our next event Please DM me

Speakers:
\- Javier, Director of Public Cloud @ Orange, Ex-AWS, Ex-Huawei, Ex-Microsoft
\- Luis, Staff SRE Intuit, Ex-NYSE
\- Ali, SWE @ Google, Google Cloud Team
\- Baha, Principal DevOps engineer, talks about running DevOps contracting

This was free event, I'm hosting audio on SoundCloud, you can check info, timestamps, and embed audio here:

https://prepare.sh/events/2025-devops-job-market

Our next event is planned on 31 Jan (date might change) and our guest speaker is an exceptional DevOps engineer and specialist in the field of Observability who personally was a role model for myself. He is a Principal Engineer @ AWS , Ex-Redhat, CNCF Ambassador, Apache foundation Contributor.

The topic of our next event is "Roadmap to become 10x DevOps Engineer".

You can join event on our server, You can find link on prepare.sh

https://redd.it/1i0u8u5
@r_devops

GoDaddy's API Restrictions Got You Down? Help Us Find a Cert-Manager-Friendly DNS Provider!

In our Kubernetes environments, we use Cert-Manager to automate certificate renewals, and it has been working flawlessly. However, with GoDaddy's recently imposed restrictions (which I’m sure many of you are aware of), we’re looking to migrate our domains to a DNS provider with an API that doesn’t have such limitations.

Can anyone recommend a DNS provider that integrates well with Cert-Manager to continue automating the renewal process?

Thanks in advance for your help!

https://redd.it/1i1005z
@r_devops

Learning platform - which one to choose?

Hi guys, I have some Linux experience, some technical support as SaaS company and about 10 months of software engineering with QA and some DevOps part like Jenkins, Terraform, Kubernetes. They fired a lot of us in my last job as a SWE and I want to upskill myself, which e-learning platform with hands on labs do you believe should work the best for me, is it KodeKloud, Cloud academy, PluralSight or Coursera and then create some of my projects and upload on GitHub?

https://redd.it/1i10mte
@r_devops

Docker image optimisation with docker-repack

Tom Forbes from GitGuardian recently published a tool to optimize docker images size and download speed: docker-repack. From his benchmark, the results seem promising with up to 8x faster download and 9x smaller images. The average reduction is more around 2-3x.

He published some details in a blog post: https://blog.gitguardian.com/demystifying-docker-optimizing-images/.

I'm not a docker internals expert but that seems like quite an improvement. I wonder if this could be available as an option to docker build at some point. Do you really want to do that in production in the first place? From my guts feeling I would say yes but there might be hidden downsides.

https://redd.it/1i138hm
@r_devops

How to prepare for 'pairing' exercises?

I've had a number of recruitment processes where I've been asked to do a pairing exercise and not done well. I'm wondering how I can better prepare for these. I'm a platform engineer with 10 YOE

Typically, in my experience, any pairing exercise comes after meeting team or Hiring Manager and system design stages. Tentative conclusion: my interview technique isn't awful if I get through those. I am asked to log into some remote environment and/via screenshare. This is typically homemade and not SAAS and often poorly integrated, e.g. high latency, low resolution screensharing with mismatched key bindings- I had one where I was using a mac to access an ubuntu desktop system and all the key bindings were Windows... Bye bye any extensions, local snippets etc. that I would normally use.

People claim that they want me to 'just tackle this as you normally would' when, besides the above, what they actually mean is 'we want to see you access it exactly the way that we think that we would ourselves in some notional perfect world'. e.g. for a new error I would typically google the error message as first step or use Claude/ChatGPT. Sure, maybe you don't like what you get from an LLM but have you seen what I can do with it? Really feels like this year's version of sneering at people using VSCode rather than Vim.

The exercise is typically something incredibly specific to their particular use case rather than a general concept and often about solving a problem in a really specific way (which just happens to be their pet method that they are hoping to implement real soon now) where there might be multiple valid solutions.

Sometimes the task is something that has very little relationship to the advertised spec, e.g. some sort of pure coding exercise for a platform engineer is a favourite gatekeep for software devs - ok so you're a full-time software dev and this is something you feel strong on to assess candidates but it's a small part of what I do and not going to highlight my strengths. If you're a startup, are you really all about artisanal hand-crafted code or are you more focussed on getting stuff out the door as fast as possible that gets the job done?

As I say, I have significant experience and I absolutely can get stuff done in the real world. Ranting about the poor match to the real world isn't going to help me pass such tests. There seems to be such a randomness of environments and scenarios that I struggle to see how I can prepare better. Any tips?

https://redd.it/1i13e9c
@r_devops

Senior devs, here's a FREE workshop on release management!

# What it is not:

This isn’t another 101 session—You'll get advanced insights tailored to engineers operating at scale. Whether you’re managing large-scale production systems or refining your team’s delivery processes, this workshop will deliver actionable takeaways you can implement immediately.

# What it is:

We’re hosting a free workshop for experienced engineers and engineering leaders managing complex systems and an AMA session focused on scaling release management processes.

You will learn directly from leaders who’ve optimized software delivery in some of the most demanding

# Meet the Experts:

\- Ankit Jain: CEO and co-founder of Aviator, a developer productivity startup. Ankit is a former Google engineer with extensive experience leading engineering teams and building efficient release pipelines.

\- Vilas Veeraraghavan: Former Engineering Leader at Netflix, Walmart, Bill . com, and TruckStop. With deep expertise in scaling CI/CD, chaos engineering, cloud-native systems, and DevEx tooling, Vilas has delivered solutions in industries ranging from streaming to logistics.

\## What to Expect:

🔍 Analyze Key Challenges
Get clarity on common pitfalls in release cycles, including:
Streamlining deployments and rollbacks.
Managing production risks and distributed systems at scale.
Identifying bottlenecks that slow delivery in high-performing teams.
🔧 Learn Scalable Best Practices:
Discover actionable strategies for:
Automating release workflows tailored to complex infrastructures.
Improving deployment visibility for better incident management.
Managing service-specific release processes in diverse team setups.
💡 Interactive Problem-Solving Session:
Engage directly with our speakers and an open AMA to tackle your toughest challenges.

Here's the RSVP link with more info

See you there! 👨‍💻👩‍💻

https://redd.it/1i16qqx
@r_devops

Options for in-house container (potential VM) platform

Most of our production workloads are in the cloud but we have a legacy setup spanning back nearly 20 years in-house that we are trying to modernize.

I'm looking to shift most development/staging to containers. I have a decent amount of experience with containers/docker etc. but not with orchestration, kubernetes etc. Nomad seems like a decent option but I'm weary about getting into best with HashiCorp too.

I'm looking at options for a smaller environment without having to get super deep into the complexities of kubernetes. I've seen nomad mentioned as well as mini kube, k3s etc. I don't know what to start with.

Also VM platform is oVirt/RHEV which is basically dead in the water and if we continue with VMs I need to replace it with something else (proxmox perhaps). Something that can do both VMs/containers like OpenShift could be an option, but I could potentially get off VMs all together and go 100% container, or build container platform on top of VM cluster.

Again, since most of this setup will be for development/staging purposes it doesn't have to be super redundant but I do have the infrastructure available to do basically whatever needed.

Should I bite the bullet and go straight to k8s or look at other alternatives?

https://redd.it/1i17cqk
@r_devops

Do you guys enjoy writing terraform?

For those building in the cloud, working in smaller orgs do you actually enjoy writing terraform? I find that I would enjoy my job much more if I could just focus on building out features instead of splitting my focus on development, cloud training & infra buildout.

Is there anything you guys use for self-service? I recently wanted to do a poc on AWS ECS but then had to deal of the headache of figuring out the right internal module version to use & then running it before I was able to start working on my poc

https://redd.it/1i194v0
@r_devops

anyone here setup bitnami kafka + cert manager + istio ingress kubernetes gateway API?

I am trying to figure out how to actually connect to it using the url. I have it running in cluster now. chatgpt is sending me down a rabbit hole...requesting help from my fellow humans. If anyone can share the setup.

https://redd.it/1i1ccha
@r_devops

Devops career growth

I recently got moved from being a fed developer into leading a small small team of contractors to build agnostic pipelines for a large organization. I am concerned that I may have just been given busy work because I’m female… guess I am looking for some reassurance that there is still potential for a lot of growth as a DevOps engineer. Opinions?

https://redd.it/1i1e70z
@r_devops

Logstash alternatives

Logstash has been my go to tool for ETLs for most of my professional career. It's either already been in place as the ETL process or the destination has been an Elasticsearch cluster making it the easiest choice to implement. I've never actually looked at any alternatives, anyone have any recommendations?

https://redd.it/1i1bo9e
@r_devops

Does GCP consider image downloads as outgoing traffic?

I wanted to clarify with more knowledgeable people, I have a website and there are a lot of images on it that are loaded into the frontend part, there are no requests on the backend.



Does GCP consider uploading images to the frontend as outgoing traffic from the server? I know it's a stupid question, but I just don't understand it anymore.



Every month, I receive a bill of $ 120 for outgoing traffic from my server in Europe, which traffic goes to America, in the amount of about 700-800 GB.



At the same time, requests do not go anywhere from my server, namely the project that lies on it, I did not write such methods there and I do not need them.

https://redd.it/1i1g8cm
@r_devops

What do people expect from DevOps/SRE at 150k+ base salary positions?

I am wondering what technical areas should one currently focus on to land high-paying job? I mostly talk about US salaries because I haven't seen such high ones in Europe or elsewhere. Is it simply something like Kubernetes and containerization overall, common IaC tooling, Clouds, Ansible, logging i.e just basic DevOps stuff, but with deeper understanding? Is it something more specific or foundational like NALSD, DSA, OS? Or maybe it's just matching a job that looks for a person with a deep knowledge in one certain topic?

Please share your experience or observations!

https://redd.it/1i1hcjz
@r_devops

Your blue-green deployment approach

Is anyone here using awscdk to do blue-green deployment via ci/cd self-service? If so, how are you doing it? I was thinking about the state or cloudformation about the resources that it already deployed. How will it do blue-green if that is the case. Also, are you happy you used awscdk to do build your automated ci/cd pipeline?

Or maybe I should be open for other ideas aside from awscdk, terraform, opentofu. How did you build your automated ci/cd pipeline? How are your developers using it to deploy their resources?

https://redd.it/1i1i3ja
@r_devops

Need help about DePIN powered server uptime manager

For a while, we’ve been developing a DePIN-powered uptime monitoring tool designed to potentially handle data from millions of devices. Our current infrastructure monitoring and uptime management service, (Checkmate) is evolving to include DePIN integration. This will allow users to burn tokens to access data from the UpRock DePIN network.

This is currently how it works under the hood:

\- Connect your wallet

\- Select the server you want to monitor

\- Choose a geographic focus—whether specific cities, countries, or entire continents—for Checkmate to send ping messages

While managing large volumes of data isn’t an issue at this stage, visualization remains a challenge. We’ve implemented MapLibre to display the data, giving users the flexibility to send one-off ping requests to the DePIN network or schedule continuous checks (e.g., every minute).

Given the novelty of this concept (similar to RIPE Atlas), visualizations will play a critical role for admins. Here's what we can currently offer on the dashboard:

\- Node distribution on a map: Visualize the number of nodes per country.

\- Selective probing: Choose probes directly on the map.

\- Probe details: View all probes selected for a specific server.

\- One-off ping tests: Perform immediate connectivity checks.

I need some feedback on how to move ahead. Since we are just a few weeks away from the general release, it would be great if I could get some thoughts. We’re considering whether this is the right balance of features or if adjustments are needed.

My immediate questions would be:

\- If you had access to a global DePIN network for server monitoring, what would you prioritize seeing on the dashboard?

\- Would you be interested in seeing historical logs? Like access logs going back to a specific time.

\- would you want to customize packet size? (set the size of the packets being sent).

Probably there are others upcoming but I would like to start with a small UI set initially.

https://redd.it/1i1jzck
@r_devops

Need help about DePIN powered server uptime manager

For a while, we’ve been developing a DePIN-powered uptime monitoring tool designed to potentially handle data from millions of devices. Our current infrastructure monitoring and uptime management service, (Checkmate) is evolving to include DePIN integration. This will allow users to burn tokens to access data from the UpRock DePIN network.

This is currently how it works under the hood:

\- Connect your wallet

\- Select the server you want to monitor

\- Choose a geographic focus—whether specific cities, countries, or entire continents—for Checkmate to send ping messages

While managing large volumes of data isn’t an issue at this stage, visualization remains a challenge. We’ve implemented MapLibre to display the data, giving users the flexibility to send one-off ping requests to the DePIN network or schedule continuous checks (e.g., every minute).

Given the novelty of this concept (similar to RIPE Atlas), visualizations will play a critical role for admins. Here's what we can currently offer on the dashboard:

\- Node distribution on a map: Visualize the number of nodes per country.

\- Selective probing: Choose probes directly on the map.

\- Probe details: View all probes selected for a specific server.

\- One-off ping tests: Perform immediate connectivity checks.

I need some feedback on how to move ahead. Since we are just a few weeks away from the general release, it would be great if I could get some thoughts. We’re considering whether this is the right balance of features or if adjustments are needed.

My immediate questions would be:

\- If you had access to a global DePIN network for server monitoring, what would you prioritize seeing on the dashboard?

\- Would you be interested in seeing historical logs? Like access logs going back to a specific time.

\- would you want to customize packet size? (set the size of the packets being sent).

Probably there are others upcoming but I would like to start with a small UI set initially.

https://redd.it/1i1jxsj
@r_devops

Salary depression

I’m a lead/staff SRE/Devops practitioner that is currently on the market. Is it just me, or are companies in the US trying to drive salaries down really hard? I’ve seen on-call lead engineers advertised as “max 120k” and I talked to someone today who hadn’t advertised a salary but their max was 140k for a lead SRE with 10+ years experience in a senior role.

Are people actually taking these salaries?

https://redd.it/1i1mzs4
@r_devops

Full-Time DevOps also doing contracting gigs?

Hi all,

I’m currently a full-time DevOps engineer. I enjoy what I do at my current employer, have great management, and don’t want to leave. However, I would like to earn more by potentially finding DevOps related contract jobs to do part-time. If any of you out there are doing this, are there any apps or resources you could point me to? Thanks in advance.

https://redd.it/1i1mkqm
@r_devops

Does Palantir's Apollo offer any real value?

Does Palantir's Apollo offer any real value? It looks and smells like a scam, but it's hard to tell. What do you think about it?

https://redd.it/1i1ofh9
@r_devops

Introducing Whispr: A DevOps tool to fetch secure vault secrets Just-In-Time for Apps

Hi DevOps community, let me introduce an exciting tool we created at Cybrota.

Whispr (Pronounced whisper) is an open-source tool to fetch vault secrets (AWS, Azure or GCP) and inject them straight into your app environment either via environment or as STDIN args. This is very handy in keeping your `.env` file free from plain-text secrets and fetch them on-demand for your local/CI app development. It avoids attacks like stolen-credentials by storing nothing.

All it takes is:

`pip install whispr`

How it works ?

1. Place an empty `.env` file in your project, and let Whispr fetch corresponding secrets from a connected vault and inject values into your program environment. All you need is to run

```sh
$ whispr run 'your_command_with_args'
```

2. Whispr uses your existing vault's authentication (IAM) to securely fetch secrets. So no new auth mechanisms are required.

3. In addition Whispr comes with handy utilities to peek your secret quickly (Vault-agnostic), or even generate a crypto-safe random sequence for rotating secrets.

Here is the GitHub project: https://github.com/cybrota/whispr

4. If you want to inject secrets into app's environment programmatically (without `run`), whispr package provides elegant API.

Tool is currently attracting 2K downloads per month, with various enterprise teams already using it to set up safe and authorized pre-commit hooks to standardizing local app development.

The project itself uses security best practices like code scanning, No shell-use while launching app, and PyPi verified attestation to release packages etc.

I would love to hear your feedback about possible improvements, criticism, and suggestions! I hope it will show up in your workflows soon!

https://redd.it/1i1qffo
@r_devops

Secure Apple Devops Interview

Hey everyone, I recently got myself an interview for a DevOps Engineering position. I’ve mostly done Cloud Ops/ Dev Ops work in AWS (4 years) with some Network admin /Support (2.5 years) work back in my earlier career days.


This role seem to focus more on KVM, Xen, Containers, Enterprise Linux, Ansible (with Python and bash obviously), telemetry tools such as Prometheus, Alertmanager. Looking for some help on a preparation plan if someone has gone through a similar interview process already. If you could give any advice or help tips that would be great!

https://redd.it/1i1okno
@r_devops