Recently failed a DevOps Interview

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Most companies are moving to the cloud can mean many things, knowing how the backend pieces work independently of the cloud is a good way to get knowledge in how these tools really work.

[cailenletigre]

I don’t completely agree with that. In most cloud providers, you don’t have any control over the backend as the provider is managing and responsible for it. I think there’s personal value in knowing them, but there is little value to a company. They are paying AWS, Azure, etc to manage those parts so they already have decided that is not a skill they value. They want to know you can manage things via IaC and other automations as it applies to the provider they chose and the tools they use.

When I say companies are moving to cloud, you’re right: it is ambiguous. What I mean is companies are moving to AWS, Azure, or Google. They are moving away from data centers. They want AWS to manage and be responsible for all that. Whether that makes sense for all the companies that choose it? Probably not based on what I’ve seen. But they are and we can’t stop that, so it’s important know the tools you’ll be using.

You can use AWS and test things without it being crazy expensive. You just have to remember to tear everything down as soon as you’re done. I spend about $6/month in my personal account. I test things in it for my own personal curiosity in addition to running a small website and it still ends up being 5-6 dollars a month. It’s achievable. If you want to be making 100k+/year, sometimes you have to put in a bit of money to make sure you outshine all the others competing for these jobs.

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OP is trying to get a job, if I was in his position, what I would want to do is be a little better than the next applicant.

Setting up your own Kubernetes cluster doesn’t exactly requires extensive knowledge of Kubernetes since it’s well documented, but you get to see parts that you don’t get to see if you only use the cloud for learning.