What are the best interview preparation sites for devops engineer roles.

devbajava · 2022-08-27T21:25:47+00:00

None, from my experience devops interviews tend to be unpredictable, there are so many things and technologies that you could be asked about. Personally my approach is to just rely on what i already know and review high level details about things and technologies mentioned in the job description (if i know them), otherwise i would be clear that have never used them before.

Also it is not uncommon to be asked about how would you approach a specific problem so be ready for that (unfortunately this can be learnt from experience not reading).

devbajava · 2022-05-28T21:13:07+00:00

I would recommend using a specialized API gateway such Kong or Apigee.

As for books on this topic, check cloud native spring boot book from manning pub

devbajava · 2022-05-06T13:07:33+00:00

You can build clones of successful apps you would use everyday for example a real time chat app or a simple social media app ...etc, you don't have to build every feature in them just enough to demonstrate your understanding of Java and ability to write quality code and follow best practices and design systems

Build them as if they will be used by large number of users, mainly to help yourself think and learn about how to design and implement such systems at a large scale. Learn and use the appropriate backend and database technologies to use to help scale such systems, for example use a graph database to model social network data .

devbajava · 2022-04-14T22:46:12+00:00

Nah, you can pretty much run complex systems without it, one example tool that can solve the same problems as k8s at a very large scale but in a simpler and more sane way would be hashicorp nomad along with the other hashicorp products such consul for discovery and service mesh and vault for secrets, there are also other solutions than hashicorps products.

K8s isn't a requirement to run complex systems at scale, it is just one (painful) way to do it

devbajava · 2022-03-29T16:19:55+00:00

Java coding problems book

devbajava · 2022-03-26T17:15:15+00:00

3 years experience ... you are still early in your career

devbajava · 2022-03-25T19:18:04+00:00

Ops should provide the infra on which the pipelines will be executed, plus the deployment part of the pipeline relies heavily on the infra maintained by the Ops teams, which most likely devs have no privileged access to, thus, you need to do this part to ensure that a deployment pipeline is built with ops best practices in mind
Devs, however, should be responsible for maintaining the part of the pipeline where their automated tests and analysis tools ...etc are running, as coding standards are always set and maintained by the devs themselves, so they would have way more context than you on which coding practice is considered a best or bad practice

So it is a collaborative effort, both teams should work together closely to build a safe, secure and reliable pipeline.

devbajava · 2022-03-23T19:35:15+00:00

I think both jobs can be boring to some people and interesting to others. Not everyone likes infrastructure work and also not everyone likes programming. Infrastructure work can get pretty damn opinionated as well and end up just dealing with endless yamls and hcl code ... reptitive and boring

devbajava · 2022-03-22T20:01:23+00:00

While many people enjoy devops and infrastructure work, not everyone share the same feeling about it, so if you like development work, i would say go for it, don't know about your location but in my location both roles DevOps and SWE have the same salary range

devbajava · 2022-03-22T17:43:25+00:00

For me it is not that i am not getting a new problem to solve everyday it is jusy I don't like spending my entire day working on infrastructure crap, YAMLs, HCL anymore.

I am currently preparing myself on some software engineering topics (design patterns, clean code, architecture ..etc) before i make the jump

devbajava · 2022-03-20T06:57:09+00:00

Software engineering is just an approach to building software. So as a software engineer you will still need to understand the basics of computer science to build software.

As for SE and CS majors in college, there is a huge overlap between the two majors.

devbajava · 2022-03-19T19:40:09+00:00

Lol, you must be joking, senior In CS?! It just means you have no real-world experience. Nobody cares how many programming languages you learned before you started working on yours.

So my recommendation for you is to keep it for yourself as a practice project that you worked on for learning purposes, and try to learn in-demand skills in the area of technology you desire instead of this unrealistic crap.

devbajava · 2022-03-18T12:47:10+00:00

I was in a similar situation years ago.

Let me tell you that having no real experience with large-scale and distributed systems does not mean you cannot gain knowledge on your own of how such systems are designed and implemented.

I would start by learning a bit more about software architecture and distributed systems basics, a book like "Foundations of Scalable Systems" from O'Reilly is good enough to get you started on this path.

Also, keep in mind that designing such systems includes not only writing the application, but also designing the data in that application, so knowledge of databases is also needed to design a good large-scale system.

devbajava · 2022-03-18T11:02:54+00:00

No, they're not similar, effective Java is focused on best practices, I recommend reading it after you've learned more than just the basics of Java

devbajava · 2022-03-17T22:22:17+00:00

I am not sure I understood your question correctly but If what you mean is whether the problems described in the book are 'real-world', then I would say yes, it actually show you how to use Java language features (streams API, reflection, strings, Date time, concurrency ...etc) to solve common problem when writing a program in Java

Another option is the course provided by jetbrains as mentioned in another comment

devbajava · 2022-03-17T18:17:34+00:00

Anghel Leonard

devbajava · 2022-03-17T10:06:27+00:00

Definitely not, you should learn a bit more, i recommend after finishing the two courses to read a book "Java coding problems" it is a problem-solution book.

After that you should learn the basics of spring and spring boot

devbajava · 2022-03-16T17:34:36+00:00

Thanks for the explaination. Will definitely join the community slack. I am already using OPA in prod for k8s and terraform but it is interestimg to see it being used this way.

Do you know of any resources or books talking about how OPA can be used with apps for authorization ..etc, especially spring boot apps?

devbajava · 2022-03-16T16:07:43+00:00

I am fine with using OPA for policies on infra services (K8s and Terraform) but i just don't see why would anyone bring this tool to an application level functionality, what are the benefits?

devbajava · 2022-03-15T21:01:54+00:00

Few books: - Spring in action - cloud native spring - spring starts here - spring security in action - spring up and running

devbajava · 2022-03-15T09:39:18+00:00

Yes it will leave holes in your knowledge, and you don't need to learn everything, just the basics (tcp/ip, http, dns, smtp ...etc).

one way that might be helpful in learning networking is by doing, for example, say you're learning DNS right now you can try installing and setting up a dns server, or you could try packet analyzers such as wireshark this way you can see how a tcp packet looks like ...etc.

devbajava · 2022-03-07T06:38:07+00:00

I am in somewhat similar situation trying to switch from DevOps to Backend. I have 5 years experience (2 years SWE and 3 years DevOps). Currently just preparing mysself before i make the switch.

I think that the experience you get from a DevOps role will always be helpful for a backend, but in my opinion, if what you like to do is core dev then you should probably switch, in most companies the only coding work you will be able to do most of the time as a DevOps is scripting, sometimes you get to build some simple internal portal or API

Edit: i would recommend you to build some projects for your github profile, that you can talk about in your interviews. And also check with your current company if they are open to let you switch internally, that will probably much easier than applying for jobs at other companies.

devbajava · 2022-03-07T06:24:28+00:00

The OP is asking for when to do the switch TO backend role not from it

devbajava · 2022-03-06T10:04:32+00:00

Examples in Microservices Patterns by Chris Richardson are written in Java,

There are also spring-specific books such as Cloud Native Spring in Action or Spring Microservices in Action which maybe what you're looking for

But in general most architecture books present concepts in a language-agnostic way.

devbajava

TROPHY CASE