Blog Post: The Work of Building for Other Engineers | Platform/SRE Mindset

Inspired by the reddit conversations lately, I have been thinking a lot about what it really means to be a software engineer who builds for other engineers. Especially when the job title says “SRE” or “DevOps/Platform,” but the actual work is always more than the tools.

So, I wrote about it: The Work of Building for Other Engineers

It has bunch of stories from my experience to demonstrate a picture. I'd love to hear if it resonates.

https://redd.it/1l1q6f3
@r_devops

“I Passed the Toughest AWS Exam — Here’s What It Took to Pass DOP-C02

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve successfully passed the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) exam!

This has been one of the most challenging yet rewarding certifications I’ve pursued. For those currently preparing, I wanted to share a few insights and tips that really helped me:

✅ My Study Strategy:
I used ITExamsLab as my primary resource, and to my surprise, about 80% of the questions on the actual exam were nearly identical to the ones I practiced there. This significantly boosted both my confidence and speed during the test.

🧠 Key Tips for Success:
1. Understand the Concepts, Not Just the Answers – Don’t just memorize; make sure you understand why each answer is correct. AWS loves scenario-based questions that test your real-world problem-solving ability.
2. Master Core AWS Services – Be especially strong in:
• CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and CodeBuild
• CloudFormation & CDK
• EC2 Auto Scaling & Load Balancing
• CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and Config
• IAM Policies & Roles (deep dive)
• OpsWorks, Systems Manager, and Elastic Beanstalk
3. Focus on CI/CD Pipelines – Know how to design, troubleshoot, and optimize continuous delivery pipelines.
4. Read the Questions Carefully – The exam often includes distractors. Focus on what the question is really asking before jumping to conclusions.
5. Practice with Timed Mock Exams – Simulate the real test environment. It helps with time management and mental stamina.

📚 Resources I Recommend:
• ITExamsLab (very close to the actual exam)
• AWS whitepapers & FAQs
• Tutorials Dojo (great for concept clarity)
• Hands-on practice in the AWS console

💪 Final Thoughts:
This exam is tough, but absolutely doable with consistency, focus, and the right preparation. Don’t just aim to pass — aim to learn and grow as an engineer.

Best of luck to anyone preparing — feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

https://redd.it/1l1vzmj
@r_devops

Don't know what to do with my career/learning path

Hi, first time posting here!

So, I'm currently working as the only DevOps at a start-up company, and thing are extremely disorganized. My immediate boss is micro-managing absolutely everything including my work, and I'm getting frustrated every day.

So, I'm currently looking for a new job, but don't know what to learn (in the meantime) to make my resume more attractive to recruiters.

My resume summary:

Internship: 1 yr and a few months at a big international electronics company
Cloud engineer: a few months in another big international company (left that job because the entire cloud team got laid off)
DevOps engineer: close to a year in another kinda big company
DevOps engineer: a year and a half (current company)
Certs: AWS CCP, english language cert (foreign speaker), and a few garbage certs from other jobs

To list a few thing related to my knowledge:

Working experience with a few cloud providers
Kubernetes beginner
CI/CD beginner/intermediate (close to beginner)
Fluent with Linux
Terraform beginner

Any and all comments will help me, I want hard truths and real advice.

Ciao.


EDIT: deleted some details, don't want to get put into a 1:1 with my boss hehe

https://redd.it/1l1xj2y
@r_devops

I automated my entire GitHub organization management with Terragrunt and OpenTofu

OK, a bit of self promotion. And sure this framework was build with help of Al, but so what? Using Google and then Stack Overflow felt cheeting 25 years ago, now completly normalised. More to come.

https://github.com/spolspol/terragrunt-github-org


https://redd.it/1l1z0v9
@r_devops

Any System Development engineers that can help me?

Hello, If you are a system development engineer L4 at Amazon, I have some questions about what the job is like? What the interview process is like and what is needed to prepare? I’m having trouble finding any information online regarding this role and the job description is very vague. Would appreciate any help! Thanks!

https://redd.it/1l1zwhe
@r_devops

Is it reasonable to ask for a raise in this context? Fully remote, in a startup, trained all of my team, became the SME for Kubernetes, been getting 10% or so raises for the past few years, became a senior.

On top of content in the title, the startup has treated me fairly well, with a bonus for staying on when my previous team left somewhat unrelated to the job, and many good raises since I started. However, every year I had verifiable reasons why I deserved a raise.

This year, I have felt meh about my performance personally because of a number of personal issues, and am going to continue having some. I have a major surgery that I will be out for at least a month and they have been completely understanding of it and pretty sure this will just be handled informally and I will just get my salary for the month.

Right now, I'm working on closing up a project before I go, and training our newest, 4th employee who has some K8s background, to bring him in line with what I've built so he can help support it.

Given my personal thoughts on my performance, I've not felt confident about asking, plus they're treating me well.

Might not be fully devops but it stills feels relevant with the context of how the work might be.

https://redd.it/1l216f8
@r_devops

Every dev has their “I’m losing my mind” week. This was mine.

Lost clipboard history copying a long-ass command.

Spent 30 mins debugging a typo.

VS code froze mid- edit during a live server tweak.

Realised I needed the same 20-line snippet for the 5th time this week.

Didn’t bookmark that perfect stack overflow answer and couldn’t find it again.

Tried Cursor. Switched to Blackbox. Then back. Ended up asking Chatgpt anyway.

Built a small internal tool to save my own sanity. No one asked. Still using it.


The thing "ai has made coding easy" is not that true. I mean it does help, but it, I can say as a dev, actually creates a mess of cognitive dissonance sometimes.

Btw, I’m not asking anything. Just wanted to share the chaos. Anyone else ride the same wave this week?

https://redd.it/1l22hka
@r_devops

DevOps resources I've gathered

Hey everyone!

I've been putting together a collection of DevOps learning resources and thought I'd share it with the community. It's got books, tutorials, documentation, and videos all organized to help with the learning journey.

Everything's free and I tried to pick resources that actually explain concepts well, not just random links.

Check it out if you're interested: https://github.com/Kaxxtik/Devops-Resources

Hope it helps someone out there! ⭐ if you find it useful.

https://redd.it/1l23x69
@r_devops

DevOps vs Data Engineer vs Cyber Security Engineer

Hi Fellow Developers, I am working in service based company for 4 years now, tagged as DevOps Engineer but since we all know about Service based company, the exposure in the tech is not that great. So now I'm planning to switch. But confused here as should I upskill myself in DevOps only or should I move to other field (making job AI proof).
Thing to note here is other that Azure DevOps (mostly classic pipeline), I do not have any much experience in DevOps (not much on K8s and docker also), so you can assume me as a fresher here (in terms of actual knowledge).
Since I'll starting from basics again, I'm confused as to move in same role or explore other. I heard a lot about cyberSec and data engineering, how they will be AI proof (even at times of AGI), so I thought on working on them. But how much company will expect from you if you change you domain with 4 year corporate experience?

Out of all the 3 profession : DevOps Engineer; Data Engineer; Cyber Security Engineer;
Which one should I pick in such a way that I can learn important stuff from them and be ready for interview (specially for Data engineering and cyber security as they are of different domain form my current job).

Also if there's any best resources I can learn from, please share that also.

[To moderator: if I made any community guidelines mistake, please update that in comment and not remove this post as I just need people's opinion here\]

https://redd.it/1l262b4
@r_devops

Did anyone received the GitHub Advanced Certificate voucher done via maintainer month security challenge ?

https://maintainermonth.github.com/security-challenge

Sorry typo GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS)
Did Anyone received it? Or Am I unlucky :(

https://redd.it/1l273nv
@r_devops

Is this a fair snapshot of Terraform challenges? Feedback wanted.

Hey folks,

I've been chatting with a bunch of DevOps folks - over 20 conversations - and put together a doc that summarizes the common Terraform issues teams run into at scale.

Here’s the PDF:
**👉 State of Terraform at Scale 2025**

This isn’t a polished whitepaper. It’s a messy list of what breaks, what frustrates people, and what workarounds they've come up with. Want your raw feedback:

What’s missing?
What’s exaggerated?
What do you completely disagree with?
What’s not painful for you but shows up here as a major problem?

No need to hold back - the more blunt, the better.

Appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks.

https://redd.it/1l280og
@r_devops

Collaboration as an Enabler of Sustainable Quality in Delivery (Reflection Article)

Hey everyone,
I shared a reflection piece on something we often overlook in DevOps: how collaboration and shared context drive quality just as much as automation.
It's part of my ongoing series on Lean Software Development, where I explore how communication patterns, visibility, and fast feedback loops support reliable delivery.

🔗 Quality through Collaboration and Visibility
📕 Series index: Lean Software Development in Practice

How do your teams make context visible and reduce misunderstandings across boundaries?

https://redd.it/1l29ycx
@r_devops

KRM as Code: Yoke Release Notes v0.13.x

## 🚀 Yoke Release Notes and Demo
Yoke is a code-first alternative to Helm and Kro, allowing you to write your charts or RGDs using code instead of YAML templates or CEL.
This release introduces the ability to define custom statuses for CRs managed by the AirTrafficController, as well as standardizing around conditions for better integration with tools like ArgoCD and Flux.
It also includes improvements to core Yoke: the apply command now always reasserts state, even if the revision is identical to the previous version.
There is now a fine-grained mechanism to opt into packages being able to read resources outside of the release, called resource-access-matchers.
---
## 📝 Changelog: v0.12.9 – v0.13.3
- pkg/flight: Improve clarity of the comment for the function flight.Release (bf1ecad)
- yoke/takeoff: Reapply desired state on takeoff, even if identical to previous revision (8c1b4e1)
- k8s/ctrl: Switch controller event source from retry watcher to dynamic informer (49c863f)
- atc: Support custom status schemas (5eabc61)
- atc: Support custom status for managed CRs (6ad60cd)
- atc: Modify flights to use standard metav1.Conditions (e24b22f)
- atc/installer: Log useful TLS cert generation messages (fa15b19)
- pkg/flight: Add observed generation to flight status (cc4c979)
- yoke&atc: Add resource matcher flags/properties for extended cluster access (102528b)
- internal/matcher: Add new test cases to matcher format (ce1afa4)
---
Thank you to our new contributors @jclasley and @Avarei for your work and insight.
Major shoutout to u/Avarei for his contributions to status management!
Yoke is an open-source project and is always looking for folks interested in contributing, raising issues or discussions, and sharing feedback. The project wouldn’t be what it is without its small but passionate community — I’m deeply humbled and grateful. Thank you.
---
As always, feedback is welcome!
Project can be found here

https://redd.it/1l2aqnd
@r_devops

Research Help: What tech problems are ignored in your company due to lack of time, budget, or ownership?

Hi everyone,

I’m a college student working on a research project related to real-world tech and software development challenges that companies face but rarely solve — due to reasons like:

* Lack of time
* Not having the right people/skills
* It’s not a “priority” despite causing problems
* No clear ownership or budget

I’m looking to collect insights from people working in the tech/IT/software field about what kind of issues are acknowledged but still ignored at work.

# ✅ Examples of what I mean:

* Tech debt that keeps growing because everyone’s afraid to touch old code
* Outdated or insecure legacy systems that no one has time to upgrade
* Code without tests that breaks often, but writing tests is “too much work”
* Lack of documentation that makes onboarding new devs difficult
* Security vulnerabilities that are logged but never patched
* Manual tasks that could be automated but never are
* Painful internal tools that devs hate but still use daily

# 💬 What I'm asking:

Is there a problem, process, or task in your company that everyone knows is an issue, but it's been ignored because there's no time, resources, or person responsible for fixing it?

I'd really appreciate any examples, stories, or patterns you’ve seen — even if it's something small but annoying. All responses will be used only for academic purposes and will stay anonymous.

Thanks a lot for helping a student learn from real industry experience 🙏

https://redd.it/1l2fwr1
@r_devops

Want to do project based learning in devops but stucked

Few days ago i decided to learn devops by not watching tutorials as it leads to tutorial hell. I started this project based learning thing but i am getting stuck ,unorganized .. like what the hell i am doing . I want to build project but then i don't know anything and i started just copy pasting things from chat gpt and tried to understand each command and also what is happening and why it is happening . But it feels like i am again walking to that tutorial hell path. I want to make my logic thinking better .


Should i continue this copy pasting and logic understanding things later till when ..

Please drop me some advice ...

https://redd.it/1l2hs2l
@r_devops

Self-hosted github actions runners - any frameworks for this?

My company uses github actions with runners based in AWS. It's haphazard, and we're about to revamp it.

We want to autoscale runners as needed, track what jobs are being run where (and their resource usage), let devs custom-define AMIs for their builds, sanity check that jobs act actually running (we've been bit by webhook outages), etc.. We could build this ourself, but don't want to reinvent the wheel.

I saw projects that look tangentially related, but they don't do everything we need and most are kubernetes/docker/fargate based anyway. We want the build process to be a simple as possible, so no building inside of docker. The idea of troubleshooting a network issue for a build that creates a docker image from within a docker image (for example) gives me anxiety.

Are there any community projects designed to manage something like this?

https://redd.it/1l2it6c
@r_devops

The Kubernetes tool I always wished existed

I built my own Kubernetes IDE because existing ones suck, I’ve been working on Agentkube - an AI-native Kubernetes IDE that runs locally and it's light-weight. Built for Platform Engineers, SREs, Devops professionals and AI infra teams.

Think: Cursor for Kubernetes.

Available on macOS & Windows – and it’s free to use! 🎉

(Except AI features — I didn’t want to burn through credits too early 😅 but I’ll make sure everyone can try them soon.)



While it’s still solo-built (so expect a few rough edges), it’s real and live now! Here is the preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdDqt7jYpsU

I’d love to hear from the DevOps community - especially those using Kubernetes or tried it

What are you using today? kubectl, Lens, k9s, Headlamp, Monokle, something else?

Any feedback is welcome - I’m trying to make Kubernetes more accessible, smart, and even enjoyable.

DM me if you liked something, feature requests, or bugs https://github.com/agentkube/agentkube/ \- or just say hi!

https://redd.it/1l2kgs1
@r_devops

I built a list of recent FAANG-style interview problems

I compiled a list from recent candidate reports, split between LC-original and non-LC interview questions.

Here’s what I found:

For LC-original questions that showed up in interviews, the most common tags were:
- Array
- Two Pointers
- Hash Map
- DP
- String
- Sorting

For questions that weren’t on LC (or were serious twists), the most common patterns were:
- Hash Map
- DP
- Greedy
- Sliding Window
- BFS / DFS
- String
- Memoization
- Heap

What surprised me was how often companies asked medium to hard problems that didn’t resemble anything in the standard prep sets. So I took some time to organized these questions with solution explanation as well.

Just sharing in case anyone else is trying to make sense of the prep landscape right now.

https://redd.it/1l2llfr
@r_devops

Phone screening questions

I have a 15 minute phone screening for a DevOps Engineer position in a couple of days. I have done my research on the interviewer and considering it's only 15 minutes, I can assume that it'll be behavioral questions.

What kind of questions could I expect is my question? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

https://redd.it/1l2nxza
@r_devops

Building Production-Ready MySQL Infrastructure on GCP with OpenTofu/Terraform: A Complete Guide

As a Senior Solution Architect, I’ve witnessed the evolution of database deployment strategies from manual server configurations to fully automated infrastructure as code. Today, I’m sharing a comprehensive solution for deploying production-ready, self-managed MySQL infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform using OpenTofu/Terraform.

This isn’t just another “hello world” Terraform tutorial. We’re building enterprise-grade infrastructure with security-first principles, automated backups, and operational excellence baked in from day one.

• Blog URL : https://dcgmechanics.medium.com/building-production-ready-mysql-infrastructure-on-gcp-with-opentofu-terraform-a-complete-guide-912ee9fee0f8

• GitHub Repository : https://github.com/dcgmechanics/OPENTOFU-GCP-MYSQL-SELF-MANAGED

Please let me know if you find this blog and IaaC code helpful, any feedback is appreciated!

Thanks!

https://redd.it/1l2le99
@r_devops

Hep With Automatically Updating Database and Notification System

Hello. I'm slowly learning to code. I need help understanding the best way to structure and develop this project.

I would like to use exclusively python because its the only language I'm confident in. Is that okay?

My goal:

* I want to maintain a cloud-hosted database that updates automatically on a set schedule (hourly or semi hourly). I’m able to pull the data manually, but I’m struggling with setting up the automation and notification system.
* I want to run scripts when the database updates that monitor the database for certain conditions and send Telegram notifications when those conditions are met. So I can see it on my phone.
* This project is not data heavy and not resource intensive. It's not a bunch of data and its not complex triggers.

I've been using chatgpt as a resource to learn. Not code for me but I don't have enough knowledge to properly guide it on this and It's been guiding me in circles.

It has recommended me Railway as a cheap way to build this, but I'm having trouble implementing it. Is Railway even the best thing to use for my project or should I start over with something else?

In Railway I have my database setup and I don't have any problem writing the scripts. But I'm having trouble implementing an existing script to run every hour, I don't understand what service I need to create.

Any guidance is appreciated.

https://redd.it/1l2u9tz
@r_devops