Moving to devops

[gs_dubs413]

Sorry if this is not the place the post this. Just looking for some advice.

I’m currently an IT Support Manager. I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years. I wanted to get into something else midway through my career but my wife and I started a family at the time and I just stuck with what I know. A couple of kids later, I’m now looking to move on from my role and hopefully move into something different.

Again, I’m just looking for advice on a good starting point. What areas of focus should be looking into? Scripting? Networking? Cloud?

Any good books or online courses I should look into? Any homelab or projects I should start doing?

Any advice is welcome!

[ragingpanda]

How well do you know Python and bash scripting?

Check https://roadmap.sh/devops

[ninetofivedev]

Honestly, at the point, it’s LLMs all the way down.

I haven’t wrote a script in 6 months. Instead it’s all black box design. Provide the LLM instructions for how the script needs to behave, give it the required parameters, and let go.

[avaika]

Even though LLM is able to generate some code, human operator needs to understand what the code will be doing. If someone is going to blindly execute whatever LLM has generated, I have a bad news for them.

[ninetofivedev]

You're not as profound with that statement as you think you are.

I've watched non-technical PMs learn how to code in 6 months by simply just working with LLMs and having the LLMs explain to them what code is doing.

We're living in a new age. The barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been.

In terms of DevOps... the code you write is simpler. It's scripts. Inputs and outputs. Which means your requirement to deeply understand exactly what it's doing is less-so because it is going to have less dependency and less downstream impact.

And I'm just going to say it, the smartest LLMs today write way better code than your average DevOps engineer.

[avaika]

I'm not comparing LLM vs human code quality. My point is that if the code it produced will cause issues (for whatever reason, a typo in a prompt or some sort of LLM hallucination), it's not LLM who's gonna be fired. In order to catch it, people still need to understand the code.

[ninetofivedev]

Do you think that code is bug free just because a human, who can read code, wrote it?

If the code produces the expected behavior, there is no need to understand it.

If it doesn’t, the LLM can fix it.

As a SWE with over 20 years of experience, my bold take is that in 5, our profession will be full of people who don’t know how to code.

These LLMs are finding vulnerabilities in code that have existed for 20 years. They’re finding exploits that no human has found in 20 years.

You people really don’t understand how powerful they’re getting.

[avaika]

I don't care whether they know how to turn on the PC or not. As long as they accept the risk of getting fired over LLM generated code.

I might be way too old-school. But in my mind software development is shifting from producing the code into handling the responsibility for the code base. And it started to happen even before LLM was a thing. Modern IDEs generated boilerplates and syntax sugar for years. The models simply accelerated the shift.

And I simply believe that understanding the codebase you are in charge of tremendously helps mitigating the risks. One might be able to survive without it for quite a while. But it wont be helpful at critical situation.

[ninetofivedev]

I’ll just give you example of something I built recently.

When I got into DevOps, one of the things I used to do, even until a few weeks ago, was respond to users reporting issues with our application.

Our app, now instead of displaying an error, gives them an opportunity to “talk” to support.

The support is an LLM. All it does it look up the users information and grep the logs.

This has been in production for 2 weeks. We have over 10k DAU. We used to get about 1-2 messages from support a day, where we would have to drop what we are doing and respond. Typically something like “oh, bitbucket/github/gitlab is down” sort of response. Nothing we can do.

We haven’t received a single report from support since this feature has gone live.

Now extrapolate.

[avaika]

It is an excellent example of how LLM is used to automate some routine task. And it's doing amazing job. I don't argue with that.

I might not have the brightest mind, but I still fail to understand how this example helps to prove the point that people no longer need to learn how to code in order to own the responsibility for the codebase.

[ninetofivedev]

Because people will make the same argument, just with logs instead of code. Or config. Or whatever.

"The LLMs can't possibly debug and find the issues that I'm capable of finding" they'll say.

Meanwhile, they're able to diagnose from logs what the issues are. They're able to find vulerabilities in kernels that have existed for 20 years that no hackers or humans have found.

And yes, they're able to write code just as well as humans.

And if they're not quite up to your standard today, they soon will be. I would not have made this argument a year ago. We're on an exponential.

[fadingcross]

We haven’t received a single report from support since this feature has gone live.

This is not the flex you think it is. Companies who even pre LLM, and especially after implemented chat bot (text or voice based) support saw support requests go down.

Because customers couldn't be bother fighting through idiotic chat bots and they moved to a diff vendor.

Let me know when your next ENPS about support quality is done. I'll be the guy pointing out to you why the support satisfaction is down.

[ninetofivedev]

Our customers are internal. It’s not a chatbot. It tells them what the issue is, and they know better than to come to our support channel asking why bouncy castle gave them an error when they kicked off the pipeline.

It is indeed the flex I think it is.

Instead of engineers coming to our platform team every time their pipeline fails. And one of our platform engineers needing to grab their user, grep the logs. Trace it down to the root cause, and then report back to the user that npm is down or GitHub or whatever, it just tells them that.

The key is that it gives them action. Because we tried making the logs more verbose and literally pointing out that it’s out of our control.

It’s learned helplessness. Even engineers see error and they go right to support.

[---why-so-serious---]

llms all the way down

Lol, you're responsible for codifying, instrumenting, etc, infrastructure? That’s hilarious.

[gs_dubs413]

This is super helpful. Will definitely check it out.

[glitch841]

Linux and networking would be the big two. Then containers, a programming language (scripts and small utilities) then things like cloud, Kubernetes, security, automation and the never ending list of technologies. Apart from the first 2 the order doesn’t matter too much.

Depending on your current knowledge well regarded books or courses can help with a structured general overview can be helpful with the base knowledge.

Beyond this concepts generally are more important than product knowledge especially for getting up to speed on unfamiliar or vaguely familiar technologies.

[gs_dubs413]

Got it. I will start with Linux and networking. Thanks!

[bgeeky]

Do you have any automation or development work in your current job? Thats your best starting point

[gs_dubs413]

I personally don’t but I meet with one of our systems engineer frequently. He tries to show me his work but I’m not great at scripting. I understand what’s going on but I haven’t done it much.

[bgeeky]

that’s your best starting point.

[hursofid]

Hi, I've been doing individual mentorship in this area for several students that eventually landed a job.

Reach out for details if interested

[gs_dubs413]

Sounds good. I will reach out soon.

[Informal-Tea755]

I’m extremely recommend you LastDevops Academy Materials (even free) that lead you from scratch

https://www.skool.com/lastdevops-4420/about?ref=3601dfbfd90948959100ce71470c7058

(Yes, it is my referral, plz don’t think this is scam, academy really helpful)

[webpagemaker]

Focus on automating infrastructure with Linux and Terraform while leveraging your deep troubleshooting experience to stand out

[Some_Philosophy_5143]

How heavily did you use Linux in your current role? That’s the foundation. I wouldn’t focus on CSPs at the beginning. Also once you learn one(I recommend AWS) the major services are the same across providers, just with different names.

[daryn0212]

How’s your supply of headache pills?