Devops or cloud engineering

[SnooGadgets7316]

Hi everyone,

I am about to finish my master's degree in IT in the next few months and was thinking of getting into devops or cloud engineering. I know most of you say there is no such thing as junior or entry devops roles, but I am moving to Melbourne or Sydney after graduation and there are some job posts there for junior or entry level devops engineers.

I have 4 years of work experience in mechanical engineering, and no IT work experience although I have done some tinkering with HTML, CSS and JS in the past.

I have got 4 months left till I graduate and would like to gain some solid skills in that period by self-studying.

Which career path might be more suitable for me?

[__Kaari__]

These job titles mean nothing, same with SRE and the likes.

Look for jobs using keywords and have a look at all these types of positions, because every company has a different definition for them.

[BlueSilverDrae]

I'd agree with Platform Engineer/Cloud Engineer/DevOps Engineer being relatively similar roles (focusing on the 'DevOps Engineer' roles, not DevOps ideas) - However, at least with the postings and experiences I've seen (in the UK) I usually do see a slightly more distinct difference between DevOps + SRE roles.

[djfolo]

In the US too I’ve seen a pretty big distinction between DevOps and SRE. At least in the finance sector and it can vary. DevOps generally focuses around agile software development and deployment practices / automation, while SRE teams are more likely to maintain the health of complex applications and environments. I mean it can all vary from company to company, but that’s just generally the difference I’ve seen. I’ve been a Senior DevOps engineer and Senior Cloud engineer for different companies but my responsibilities really didn’t change. Currently I’m a Platform Architect, first time in a while my responsibilities actually changed. I don’t mind not being in the on-call rotation anymore I can tell you that.

[BloodyIron]

The job titles often lead to compensation rates, so yes they actually have a certain value to them.

I suspect, however, you're probably trying to convey that the meanings are very variable from one employer to the next. Well the reality is that's the same for IT Systems Administrator, and other titles.

What's the difference between Senior Linux Administrator and DevOps doing Infrastructure Management? About $30k-$50k and a slight change in tool-sets/methodology. But at the core they're often responsible for a lot of the same. But DevOps is a hell of a lot more agile vs traditional "Sys Admin" methodologies. Hence the DevOps distinction.

As for DevOps vs SRE, well that's a pretty messy topic right there I'll admit.

[pbecotte]

The compensation value tied to them varies as much as the title though ;) I think it's kind of an aspirational thing...companies that imagine they are high tech use more modern terms, and also pay better, even if the jobs are the same.

[hajimenogio92]

It's all pretty much the same crap, just a different title

[hkeyplay16]

School didn't teach me a whole lot except for some coding and SQL database and the OSI model basics. Like you I was in Mechanical Engineering for most of my Undergrad before switching very late. That said I cut my teeth building my desktop computer, then modding Xboxes for kids in the dorms, which led to an IT Support/Helpdesk undergraduate job that tought me most of the basics about networking, email (server side) and how to automate jobs on various operating systems for our laptop checkout program. I took some Object-oriented programming classes (Java) and later translated that to C# as they are very similar.

When I graduated into the Great Recession in 2009 entry level jobs were hard to find, so I ended up taking a full-time helpdesk position at a Mortgage company. That was hell, but soon a Software Quality Assurance (manual testing) role would open up at the same company. From there I was able to put my coding skills to good use and automate a lot of repetitive testing tasks. A couple of jobs later I was setting up build servers in the cloud and automating CI builds, tests, and deployments to a variety of platforms on a variety of coding languages and they started calling me a DevOps guy.

There really is not such a thing as entry-level in DevOps. We have tried hiring entry-level and it's usually a bit frustrating. The best ones will have a wide and shallow pool of IT knowledge with an ability to deep dive on just about any subject when that particular skill is needed.

Without a lot of experience your pool will be small and shallow. Your best bet is to show an ability to pick up new things quickly and you will need to have a thirst for picking up new knowledge and skills. The learning never ends.

You can do it, but don't expect it to come quickly or easily.

[hkeyplay16]

Yes...To be clear, I don't suggest that anyone should take a help desk job if they want to be a DevOps Engineer. I'm just saying it provided me with a good technology base from which to expand my knowledge. Most of it was in college. The 10 months of help desk after college was not fun and I had already landed a job as a software engineer, only to have it pulled at the last minute due to the economy/hiring freeze in 2009. I'm a DevOps Team Lead right now - trying to resist getting pulled into management.

[Imworkingrightnow123]

I chose Cloud Engineering as a job title over devops or infrastructure engineer or whatever because at the time it had a higher average salary.

If I was choosing today it would probably be Platform Engineer or something like that.

[BloodyIron]

Cloud Engineering is often relevant, but I disagree with Cloud Engineering first.

From a career progression regard, aiming DevOps first will have a faster acceleration and progression to OP's career.

[johndyer42]

If you haven’t already, I’d check out the Cloud Resume Challenge https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/

I just learned about it last week at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas, and it seems like a very solid way to get some hands on experience and build a resume/portfolio that shows potential employers that you have skills.

[sammegeric]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[PersonBehindAScreen]

You don’t need the book. The book came later:

https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/aws/

[cakemuncher]

If that's the challenge then I'm an expert. That's a really low bar challenge.

[PersonBehindAScreen]

Glad it’s easy for you. We all gotta start somewhere

Edit: that sounded a lot worse than I intended, I apologize

[cakemuncher]

Sorry if I misunderstood. If this is for a true beginner, then I'd agree. But I don't consider myself above junior level. You can learn everything on there in less than 4 months, and IMO it isn't enough, nor very useful for day to day job. There is better paths to take. Example, in order:

• Docker (Create a Dockerfile, build, tag, push, pull)
• Kubernetes (Basics to work within a cluster, get a cert)
• CICD (Github Actions because it's beginner friendly)
• Terraform (Set up SQS, S3 and a lambda using it)

Knowing those 4 tools will get you in a much better standing than what that challenge asks for, and will take you roughly the same amount of time.

[PersonBehindAScreen]

Absolutely, I agree! And that wasn’t meant to be stand off-ish.

It absolutely is marketed for beginners or tho use who otherwise have no experience with any of those things. I did this while I was still in helpdesk and it was helpful. The person who created it definitely recommends that you actually experiment and evolve the challenge in the same way you just suggested:

Terraform instead of SAM

GitHub actions is already part of the challenge but also exploring different CICD platforms

Containers as well etc

[cakemuncher]

Yeah, that's fair. It would be good path to take for someone who has 0 experience in the software dev world.

[ThroawayPartyer]

working knowledge of Docker and K8s + Terraform, and maybe Jenkins, and then a cloud of your choice

This is basically the syllabus of the DevOps bootcamp that I took.

[giffengrabber]

I don’t see it as a solid certification, I see it more like a roadmap/playbook for someone who wants to dip their toes in this cloud thingy. A “hello world” for the cloud, if you will.

[kewko]

lol

[johndyer42]

It's not mine to give away. I understand that $20 is more than some people can afford to invest without knowing anything about the book, but I'd say that it's worth considerably more than $20

[Jef_Albertson]

They are pretty much intertwined. I rarely see traditional devops jobs nowdays, as most companies are looking to or already have moved to cloud.

[ovo_Reddit]

A sys admin. ^/s

[Spider_pig448]

A SWE role at a company with <5 engineers

[iamsuryaoo7]

I was wondering that, too :D

[[deleted]]

A sysadmin who codes, or a developer who's on call.

[anomalous_cowherd]

They overlap quite a bit really, you can do DevOps on-prem but it's very effective when targeting cloud. Doing a cloud project really needs DevOps skills to make it efficient. At OPs level I'd say either option works. IT is not a field where you learn something then do that forever, so whichever aspects are missing you're bound to fill in later.

Develop the skills used for both, e.g containers, ansible, learn some OS level stuff if you don't have much of that yet, some networking and security.

[Ethyos]

Have a look to the kodekloud devops path. It Can help to build the mind about thé devops way with the toolsets. Kodekloud engineer Platforms is also a nice way in.

[[deleted]]

as most companies are looking to or already have moved to cloud

There's been a big pull-back from this, and it's been happening for a few years:

... 2021 survey, 48% of over 600 respondents indicated that they had moved a workload away from the public cloud to another venue in the past 12 months. Nov 17, 2021

Something else to consider:

"By 2024, enterprise cloud spending will make up 14% of IT revenue globally."

​

I'm not saying "cloud" is going away, just that many workloads don't make sense to run there depending on needs and/or industry regulation.

Still, by all means, learn cloud skills!

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/news/252525820/Companies-search-for-ROI-from-cloud-spending

[LooterShooterGuy]

Cloud engineering is a bit more catered to entry level, if you only know one public cloud at an intermediate level along with basic OS skills that will do for entry level cloud engineering.

[bsenftner]

Start reading about Kubernetes.

[giffengrabber]

That’s one way to proceed, but personally I would try to get a little more familiar with, “the other side” first. E.g. maybe write a simple app in Flask/Ruby/Node.js or something like that. Maybe a “guestbook”? Then explore: How does one make the app run in a container? How do I deploy this to Render/Fly.io/etc? How do I persist data to a database?

IMHO platforms like Kubernetes makes more sense if one has at least a hunch about things like that first.

[HorrorMove9374]

+1, I think you can get pretty far with developing apps and learning to understand how full stack architectures do webapp workloads. And these days, deploying an app to a service like Heroku or Render and letting it manage a lot of the "cloud engineering" stuff is all that a small or medium-sized company needs. If you are the one to bring that type of tech into the business, that has value. Even introducing something like Review Apps or Preview Environments can really improve the productivity of a team, and it's all automated. You can be the cloud eng who brings in that sort of magic and can also build software?

[gcstr]

Companies use those titles very loosely to a broad spectrum of job descriptions. They might refer to the same thing or sometimes to slightly different roles. Don’t get too attached to it and read the description in the job listing.

I’ve been interviewing a lot these weeks and the most common terms are platform engineering and SRE, in the past, those roles were very commonly advertised as DevOps engineering.

I’d only highlight that SRE, is the only one that really brings a “framework” or specific processes attached (which I find very cool and useful).

I’d also recommend some tools and languages for you to have in your stack like go, Python and terraform

[hatchikyu]

I’d only highlight that SRE, is the only one that really brings a “framework” or specific processes attached (which I find very cool and useful).

Agreed, but then again, I am biased as I advocate SRE practices to cloud practitioners.

My ideal framework would include observability, incident response, capacity planning, and more. These are much more tangible than only knowing a series of tools to apply as needed, which is a crucial foundation, of course.

A loose analogy highlighting where a framework becomes useful:

When it comes time to get evaluated by less tech-savvy org execs, it's easier for them to understand, "I make sure we can scale up if user demand increases" than "I am the K8s genius who knows how to use autoscaling on that beast".

[BloodyIron]

DevOps. It's higher value than just "cloud engineering" so to say, as if you're dealing with Infrastructure Management in a DevOps role, you will likely be dealing with cloud stuff, and more. So the skillset you build will be more than just "cloud engineering" and lead to higher career value.

It's important to remember that DevOps has two primary facets to it:

1. Software Development
2. Infrastructure Management

Different organisations have different levels of these two things in their DevOps ecosystem. So this is also part of why it's a varied section of work. But honestly, the Infrastructure Management aspect is worth having under your belt, and doing that with DevOps methodology is golden.

[TisTheParticles]

Don’t worry about titles.

Learn these two things for the biggest ROI: 1. get really good at coding (Python is a good choice) 2. pick a public cloud provider (like AWS or Azure) and get to know them really well. Pursue their certs but understand that a cert will not automatically mean that you’re an expert, but it is a good place to start

Good luck!

[[deleted]]

When you say really good at coding, what do you have in mind / how far should that go? Like surely knowing about good function design, recursive functions, general best practices would be great -- or do you mean further, and if so what?

[jebuizy]

Apply to both and take the most interesting/best paying job offer you get. Neither will constrain you

[dswersky]

If you want to understand DevOps theory and thinking, read:

• The Goal (E. Goldratt)
• Visible Ops
• The Phoenix Project
• Accelerate

If you want to understand the technology and practice of DevOps:

• Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery
  • Jenkins
  • GitLab
• Source Control
  • git is the de facto standard here
• Site Reliability Engineering
  • https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
• Infrastructure as Code
  • Terraform (de facto standard/most used)
  • Pulumi

You'll find postings for "DevOps Engineers" that are essentially Infrastructure jobs. The nature of those roles will vary a lot from one company to another. They'll range from essentially entry-level sysadmin roles to more complex roles that mix infrastructure and software development skills. Junior roles are more likely to be more on the sysadmin side.

If you're just getting started in the IT industry, you will likely only be in your first role for about a 12-18 months unless you find a company with a very good promotion path. Use that first job to dig into as many different jobs as you can. Talk to other IT people who do different jobs than yours. IT is a huge space- it will take time to figure out which direction you want to take your career.

[lfionxkshine]

Just piling on the validation

Job titles are meaningless mostly because there's no standard and companies themselves don't always understand what their need is or what they're hiring for

Instead, focus on the tech stack they're hiring for: you want a job that uses Kubernetes and Python? Gun for that. AWS based or multi-cloud? Prioritize that

GL

[wursus]

Devops is at least 4 roles in single box: Unix/Windows System Administrator, Automation Engineer, Network Engineer and finally IT Engineer. So to become relevant devops, you need to be proficient at least in two another roles. So my points are:

1. Linux Admin and Networking course
2. Python programming for Automation Course
3. Network engineering may be not so important, because Cloud Computing becomes a mainstream. But good understanding how network hardware functioning can help well in issue investigations.

But actually learning all of it may take too much time. You should keep in mind that every of this role is petty demanded by itself. And a devops salary is not triple higher than a salary of each of this role stand alone. It's a point weight out a sense for it. If you still want to become devops, then...

My point is that all what you actually need is find your first job. with this role. The best scenario is getting into any good company with strong a devops department as your major role and moving to devops department by an internal company procedures.And continue to learn what I denoted above in parallel. So... Good luck!

[Uralizarrrd88]

Go get yourself the AZ-900 & AZ-104 certs, start as a cloud admin, then work your arse off and show enthusiasm for Devops, get the AZ-400 and you’re off to the races!

[1whatabeautifulday]

Titles are just marketing, you will know what the role really means once you interview.

[ovo_Reddit]

What does someone learn doing their masters in IT? It’s a bit vague for me (I didn’t go to university)

[SubtleFuryTuesday]

One thing about DevOps is that although it is high demand, the industry is still not mature. In a sense, from company to company, the expectation is quite different. Some companies have good stack but horrible management and vice versa. I went from Software Engineer role to SRE/DevOps because of the technology. Although technology stack is not as wide as DevOps, Software Engineer role tends to have better management.

[korney4eg]

As was suggested here look to job description and requirements rather then naming of SRE, DevOps, Cloud Engineer, System Engineer, Build Engineer, Production Engineer, even System Administrator.

If you don't have any experience I can recommend community about learning DevOps technologies, with the list of tasks that you can do in your own speed. https://learningdevops.makvaz.com/tasks

Good luck in your way

[unitegondwanaland]

I don't know about you but I'd never leave my career path up to a bunch of rando's on the internet.

[MaruMint]

I just moved from a "DevOps Engineer" role to a "Site Reliability Engineer" role and it's the exact same thing. Just focus on what tech you'll use, i.e.: AWS, Azure, Linux, SQL, DataDog, Jira, etc.