[Question] Advice on Lateral job transition when leaving Devops and going back to school

I am planning to pivot out of devops/tech entirely. For me this means going back to school for a masters, which will be quite expensive.

I am evaluating my options for a lateral transition to a job that will pay the bills for the next 3-5 years in the mean-time. I would like to not completely kill my tech career in case I need it as a fall-back. Ideally I'm looking for something I could transition to quickly (say a few months), but I'm also willing to take another devops job for another year to work on certs/portfolio if that is the better way to go.

**My Criteria**

* Need a solid salary so I can save up to pay for school
* Staying devops for awhile would probably pay the most and get me there sooner, but also would be very difficult for me
* Position needs to have enough demand that I can get hired
* Reasonably low stress and out of hours work
* Ideally low-barrier to entry (with my background)
* Boring is perfectly fine for me right now

**What I'm looking to avoid**

* 24/7 support
* Regular out-of-hours support
* Constant troubleshooting

**My Background**

* \~10 years in tech (\~4 sysadmin/engineer + \~6 Devops/Platform Engineering)
* Worked with the usual stack (Iac, ci/cd, cloud providers . . .)
* I've had alot of certs (google, vmware, cisco, etc . . .) in the past

**What I'm Considering**

* Technical Writing
* I really the idea of this and have started looking into it, but I'm not sure:
* How soon this will be taken over by ML/LLMS
* How high the barrier to entry is
* IAM
* In alot of ways this sounds great, but I'm not sure how difficult the transition would be?
* Security Analyst
* This sounds really hit-or-miss (could be ok, could be very stressful)
* Might require going back to a junior position to get a job?

Has anyone else taken a similar route? If so what do you think about the positions I'm considering? Is there something else you might consider? I've also considered trying to find a lower-stress devops position at some larger company, but that's not ideal for me.

https://redd.it/1mx96h5
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Smarter Scaling of Kubernetes workloads with Keda

Scaling workloads efficiently in Kubernetes is one of the biggest challenges platform teams and developers face today. Kubernetes does provide a built-in Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), but that mechanism is primarily tied to CPU and memory usage. While that works for some workloads, modern applications often need far more flexibility.

What if you want to scale your application based on the length of an SQS queue, the number of events in Kafka, or even the size of objects in an S3 bucket? That’s where KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) comes into play.

KEDA extends Kubernetes’ native autoscaling capabilities by allowing you to scale based on real-world events, not just infrastructure metrics. It’s lightweight, easy to deploy, and integrates seamlessly with the Kubernetes API. Even better, it works alongside the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler you may already be using — giving you the best of both worlds.

https://youtu.be/S5yUpRGkRPY

https://redd.it/1mxeg8e
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Help me to become a Devops Engineer

Hey Guys,
I want to start learning Devops Engineering.
I am from non-technical background and want to start from scratch.
Could you please guys provide me a best roadmap to start to make a career in Devops Engineer?
Like where I can start or Suggest me any best courses for that?


https://redd.it/1mxh7e9
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Keep motivation during my devOps self learning journey

Currently I'm following devOps online bootcamp. It's consists with Linux , git , docker , jenkin , k8s , AWS and monitoring tools. My problem is how to maintain good discipline and motivation for self studying thos stuffs. Currently I'm MSc student in Computer Science. Looking for some advices.

https://redd.it/1mxiwz8
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Visa inc

Has anyone here Know what its like on a final interview in Visa Inc? Kinda overthinking because it is onsite interview.

https://redd.it/1mxkb3n
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What is the biggest networking problem that you helped solve?

What is the biggest networking problem that you helped solve? I think we had a misconfigured security group that prevented us from accessing production server through SSH and no one thought about checking the security group for some odd reason. I think all the brains of the organization left because of the angry project manager who kept shouting at them.

https://redd.it/1mxnam2
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Database Containers for Ephemeral Lower Level Environments

Hi community, I was wondering if anyone had any experience building out database images with pre seeded schema and seed data in containers? My use case is the following - I have multiple lowers level ephemeral environments with many different databases and would like to provide a ready made database container that can be instantiated for quick development iterations. I don’t need these dbs to be long live or really have any other backups of any sort, I just need quickly deployable seeded database that can be created on the fly. Does anyone have any experience building this type of infrastructure or operationalizing this type of setup with containers?

https://redd.it/1mxnav2
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Ridiculous Production issue

I am a fullstack dev.
I have a full stack Next.js application built and my devops team deployed it on the azure app service with a cicd pipeline. In the beginning, i have accidentally send an env file to my devops team which had BASE_URL=https://localhost:3000. So, after deployment i see all of the requests made by the app are being hit to localhost:3000 in production. So I tried replacing the localhost url with production url in the env file(didn't include this file in .gitignore) and pushing it to the pipeline again , but even after that i don't see any change in the request url that is being hit from the frontend in production. It is still hitting localhost:3000.

The deployment is on Azure app service and we are using github actions. I tried changing the env using github actions also but no use, it still hits the same localhost:3000 url.

I'm not sure whether the applicatio code is causing this or the production environment.

Any help would be highly appreciated🙌

Note:
No localhost urls were used as hardcode values in the app, they are perfectly intended to read from the env file.

https://redd.it/1mxs6s5
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DevOps Team Leader Technical Assessment

So recently applied for a devops team leader position and after the initial contact with their inhouse HR, I was presented with a technical assessment.

Previously I've done technical assessments for devops positions, and they might give you a case scenario 1-2 hours max and they would test your general knowledge along with which devops practices you apply in the assessment, however in this case I was presented with 4-5 hours technical assessment , and mind you I don't mind that it's 4-5 hours, it's for a team lead position, so maybe understandable? but what is concerning me that the assessment is too specific for their business.

They need a full architecture, with budgeting roadmap , specific team conflict resolutions.

Just wondering if this is normal? if this is in line with other technical assessments that you people have done when applying for Devops team lead positions.

Thank you

https://redd.it/1mxvb5g
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Agentic AI project madness

How do you handle the increase in agentic AI projects in your organization in regards to availability, testability and the endless composition of LLMs?

The latest approach of our data scientists:

- develop 10+ Agents that all interact autonomously
- write test cases with another LLM
- Judge the output of the test cases with another LLM
- Summarize the errors and reasons why it failed with another LLM

Four layers of LLM just doesnt sit right with me once we're supposed to go into production. Exporting these test results as metrics and building an error budget around might cut it but just doesnt feel right.

https://redd.it/1mxwtxi
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Too many dashboards, can one board really do it all?

I keep switching between grafana for monitoring, jira for releases and a custom monday dev board for sprint health. It feels like I’m living in tabs. Has anyone consolidated all key metrics i,e uptime, backlog and performance into a single view? How did you pull it off without sacrificing detail

https://redd.it/1mxwiog
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Is it unreasonable to expect basic repo hygiene and tool integration skills from a DevOps engineer? (We actually refer to them as the “build” team)

I’m on the AppSec team, and we constantly run into friction with one of our DevOps engineers who seems to lack foundational skills. For example, we asked him to integrate Veracode SAST scans with our Azure DevOps repos, and he had no idea how to approach it—we had to walk him through every step.

Recently, we scanned a branch and flagged issues. The developer claimed the scan was of “dev code” and not “SIT code.” When I asked why dev code was in the SIT branch, we discovered they commit dev, SIT, load test, and even prod code into the same repo and branches. From what I can tell, it’s a single repository with multiple branches (like way too many branches), but the branching strategy is either nonexistent or completely misused.

This kind of repo chaos makes it nearly impossible to maintain clean environments or run meaningful scans. Is it fair to expect a DevOps engineer to know how to:

• Set up basic SAST integrations in Azure DevOps?
• Maintain a sane branching strategy?
• Understand the implications of mixing environments in a single branch?


I’m trying to gauge whether my expectations are off or if this is a legitimate skills gap. Would love to hear how others handle this kind of situation or what baseline skills you expect from your DevOps.

https://redd.it/1my00ev
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So so burnt outt

So I've been working in this startup which had existing infra setup by 1 single senior. After which he quit. Now i was hired 0yoe exp. Its been 6months now, im so so burnt out. Most days i dont even know whats critical whats not. I've worked bit on jenkins, ecr, eks, anisble but nothing in deep. Its just so intimidating that there's so much to do and I'm not even sure if theyre the right approach. Anyone has had similar experiences? How did y'all cope with that.

https://redd.it/1my0jya
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Walkthrough: CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions to Deploy Python App on Kubernetes

I recently created a **video walkthrough** on setting up a CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions to Deploy Python App on Kubernetes



**In this video, I cover:**

How to create a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions

Build and push Docker images automatically

Deploy Python apps on a Kubernetes cluster

Use kubectl and K8S manifests in GitHub Actions workflows



I focused on practical steps , so it might be helpful for folks looking for practice examples or deeper control.



Here’s the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTjuKgekChk

https://redd.it/1my4mu7
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Proxmox-GitOps: self-contained, extensible GitOps base for Proxmox

A while ago I shared the first steps of Proxmox-GitOps – an extensible, self-bootstrapping GitOps environment for Proxmox. 
By now it feels in a good state to share properly, and maybe some of you may be interested in trying it also as a Homelab-as-Code starting point. 

Github: https://github.com/stevius10/Proxmox-GitOps

One command bootstrap: deploy to Docker, Docker deploy to Proxmox

Consistent container base configuration: default app., config users, automated key management, tooling etc. for deterministic, idempotent container setup

Application-logic container repositories: container repositories hold only application logic; shared libraries, pipelines, and integration come by convention

Monorepository representation with recursively referenced submodules: suitable for VCS mirrors, modularized at runtime, automatically extended by libs

Pipeline concept
- GitOps environment runs identically in a container; pushing its codebase (monorepo and container libs referenced as submodules) into CI/CD
- This triggers the pipeline from within itself after accepting pull requests: each container applies the same processed pipelines, enforces desired state, and updates references
- Provisioning uses Ansible via the Proxmox API; configuration inside containers is handled by Chef/Cinc cookbooks
- Shared configuration automatically propagates
- Containers integrate seamlessly by following the same predefined pipelines and conventions, both at the container level and within the monorepository

The control plane is built on the same base it uses for the containers, verifying its own foundation implies verified container base. A reproducible and adaptable starting point for container automation 🙂

It’s still under development, so there may be rough edges — feedback, experiences or just a thought are more than welcome! 

https://redd.it/1my99j2
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I vibecoded the ultimate set-and-forget IaC ubuntu hardening. Am I getting popped?

Today I hyperfixated on this IaC configuration for the ultimate bulletproof set-and-forget Ubuntu Server.

The goal was to make it as rugged as possible without requiring no active periodic monitoring/maintenance, with a fully-featured email-based alert system. (just in case of anomalies, no periodic emails).

Among basic access and ssh hardening, it configures clam, aide, rkhunter, fail2ban, apparmor and unattended-upgrades, as well as running a one-time Lynis scan at the end.

I was curious about any feedback on it, and on whether you'd change/add anything. Do you think any non-negotiables are missing?

https://github.com/benvigano/ubuntu\_sturdy

https://redd.it/1mycv2y
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Library for AWS cloud infrastructure manager with minimal code — looking for developer feedback

As a Backend and Deep Learning developer, I’ve always found managing AWS on my own pretty complicated. Many times, when we’re coding in Python, we don’t want to stop and jump into the AWS console just to run a quick test or train a model.

AWS is the most affordable and flexible cloud provider, which is why most of us end up using it. I’m working on a library to make that workflow much simpler:

1. Just import the library, provide your AWS API keys, and that’s all the configuration needed.
2. Run your Python function or program directly with this library. The syntax is extremely simplified (I’d love suggestions: what minimum parameters would you expect as developers to keep it short?).
3. Once the function or program finishes, the instance shuts down automatically, so it behaves almost like a serverless service.
4. While running, you can call dashboard(), which spins up a local dashboard to configure things like domain setup and view resources — all simplified.

What do you think of this idea? Would this be useful in the developer community? Any feedback on how to shape it further is really appreciated!

https://redd.it/1mye9ca
@r_devops

How are you using AI in your day to day DevOps work?

I’ve been seeing a lot of mixed opinions about AI in DevOps. Some say it’s just hype, while others swear by it for productivity. I’m curious to hear directly from this community:

Do you use AI in your daily DevOps workflow?
What are your go to AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Augment Code etc.)?
How exactly are they helping you (infra automation, troubleshooting, writing pipelines, documentation, monitoring, etc.)?
Do you think AI is genuinely improving DevOps practices, or is it still more of a “nice to have” at this point?

Would love to know how others are integrating AI into real-world DevOps work.

https://redd.it/1myg7to
@r_devops

What’s it like working at Oracle as a DevOps/SRE?

Hey folks,

I recently applied for a DevOps/SRE role at Oracle and wanted to hear from people with first-hand experience there. The position I applied for is focused on cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, observability, and supporting Oracle Analytics services in a 24x7 environment.

I’m curious about the day-to-day reality:
• Is Oracle a very bureaucratic and “heavy process” kind of company, or do teams actually work in an agile way?
• How is the culture in terms of innovation, autonomy, and tooling do engineers get freedom to propose improvements, or is it more about following strict procedures?
• What’s the balance between firefighting (incidents, on-call, troubleshooting) and building/engineering new solutions?
• How is career growth and recognition for technical roles?

I know Oracle is a huge company with a long history, so I’m trying to figure out if the experience leans more towards a traditional/slow enterprise environment or if some teams are more modern and fast-moving.

Would love to hear honest feedback (positive or negative) from current or former Oracle engineers about what it’s actually like working there.

Thanks in advance!

https://redd.it/1myis5t
@r_devops

I don't know what career to choose?

Hi everyone,
I’m based in Australia and I’m trying to figure out the best future career path for me in tech. Right now I’m looking at DevOps, Cloud Architecture, or Data Engineering, but I’m not sure which one to focus on.

About me:

Early in my career (currently High School)
I enjoy problem-solving, coding and making projects
My goals are: good salary, able to take days to work from home, and clear career progression

My questions are:

Which of these fields has the best long-term future in Australia?
What’s the typical entry-level pathway into each one?
If you were starting out now, which would you choose and why?

Any advice or personal experience would mean a lot—thanks!

https://redd.it/1myjq7k
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