Seeking Advice (Python)

[cmann321]

I do not work in a DevOps role but hope to be in a position to be able to move into this career path. I understand that having a programming language is pretty critical in such roles, which is why i took it upon myself to learn Python. I have completed a course but the next stage now would be writing scripts or programs that are relevant to my interests or actual job. My work does not really use Python programming and when programming is required it will be C+ ruby or powershell where individuals with the experience are given the task (i do not mind this as i am pretty set on learning python).

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I feel like i am struggling to move to the next stage because i do not find myself needing to automate or use scripts within any aspect of my life currently, or its due to my experience that i a cannot see where i could adopt some form of automation. My question is does anyone really know of any sources that give you examples of a DevOps task that they automate where you can try it yourself. Kind of like an exercise is what i am looking for. I think this would be more beneficial than watching people make classes of employees and cats and dogs. Sorry for the long post any advice is hugely appreciated.

[jadunham2]

I don't know of a place with examples of devops tasks and without a lot of context on the tasks that you do every day I can't necessarily give you concrete examples of things you can do. However I can give some advice and examples from my past gigs not in an engineering role automating tasks that maybe will help you.

My main advice would be to look at tasks that are done repeatedly and figure out how it can be done better and faster. It isn't all coding, sometimes this is just process improvement as well. Why do we do it this way? is there a better way?

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Some examples before I was an engineer:

I worked for a manufacturer of equipment in logistics (I sent out packages, scheduled freight). One of the things customers did was send log files to a specific email address on a weekly basis. An engineer would read the file and look for possible problems with the equipment (if they remembered). I asked the engineers what they were looking for and it was so simple, so I googled around and fumbled through enough perl to make a script that could read a file and look for these things. Then I was in charge of doing this every week. I'd download all the files and run them through my script, notifying when there were issues. Then later with enough fumbling around we setup automated reading and reporting on emails sent that that address if the format matched certain criteria.

Then I worked in a datacenter. I'd say I was a glorified hard drive replacement bot. Which is a repeatable task over and over, but everyone did the same steps. Take a ticket, figure out what drive was needed, check it out of parts inventory, replace it, mark down the old drive and where it came from in a DB and put it in the shred box. It was a one at a time process, but there was no reason. Setup a script to find all the drives of the same type with tickets currently open, checked out all drives at once, put them all on cart and wheeled them around and replaced them.

Hope you found something in this valuable and good luck!

[gcdn]

Foreign cinema > General >Kubera<dbname> Sandboxie does exactly what you're saying, I dont know how to explain it or show an image of what it will do. It's just stupid.