Starting the move to DevOps

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I wish moving to DevOps was easy, all you need to do is start applying for DevOps opportunities and someone will give me a chance to join a company and start learning DevOps , unfortunately I don’t think its quite that simple, its sort of traditional that you have to bring something to the party, as in an exchange, usually of skills in a technology that said company wants that you can exchange for them giving you other skills, a bit I suppose like “Bring a bottle”…bring a bottle of wine your fine, you can have a beer, bring fizzy water well you can drink that.

So what is the best way forward, I mean I have quite a lot of skills in the wintel arena and throughly used to managing the Microsoft stack in all its different flavours, throw in good PowerShell skills, oh and also being able to scare a VMWare environment into a semblance of order I think I am not in a bad place, but which skills are transferable, how do I know which is the best way forward to change this old engineer into a DevOps engineer.

Finding myself in the position of needing to know what makes up a DevOps engineer’s skill base, so I started doing a lot of reading, researching on the web (we all live here on the web, right) looking for articles on making the transition and which skills were important to know. I was lucky enough to fall on an invite by Mike Pfieffer to a webinar on this very subject, I listen to his Pod Cast https://cloudskills.fm its always entertains, so I signed up, well this turned out to be one of the best things I could have done, Mike laid it out for all on the webinar what the areas I needed to look at, listed below is the result of my notes, not perfect but good enough to make a start

  1. Systems Administration — Im OK here I know bit about this so thats a tick
  2. How Web Applications Work — hmm I think I know about this spent lots of time messing in IIS and helping developer’s deliver websites, so partial tick with a. note to make sure I understand it properly
  3. One Programming/Scripting language — Im OK here I know PowerShell quite well, I at home in it so tick number 2
  4. Infrastructure as Code — Ive been playing and studying this, Geek at heart like I am. I love making environments with code, manipulating servers etc, so this I am OK with but need to formalise my training, so certification study here
  5. Cloud Native Technologies – Azure, AWS, Google done some not a lot, study here too, certifications maybe, who knows…well I do actually, Azure certs for me here, right through to DevOps.
  6. CI/CD — another area, I know the principals in, so another area of study…

So not a small amount of areas that need some attention, but I don’t see anything that I am not looking forward to looking into… oh throw in some Linux training and I am done…time to get cracking

One last thing what’s this post for, why share this thought process what does it all mean, well its another thing Mike said…to help reinforce the learning, a way of doing this is to share what you’re learning right it down pass it on, it helps you remember and you just might help someone else… so taking that on board here’s my blog. Also I am following in the footsteps of an engineer who I only really crossed paths with briefly Sam Akroyd (https://www.samakroyd.com/), I am linked to him on Linked In, was always impressed with him and he’s started a blog, so I followed suit, sorry for copying Sam 🙂

On another note please don’t expect it to be eloquent, those that know me will tell you I am not, witty occasionally, straightforward all the time, but eloquent not, I am a Yorkshireman which means I miss letters out when I talk, sometimes whole words so that will happen here in my typing, not an excuse just a heads up. Ill try to bring a little humour to it as well, as I do I like a laugh, opinions always welcome so comment away. Speak again soon,

Robin

3 thoughts on “Starting the move to DevOps

  1. Pingback: Enter the World of DevOps | Stephen Hackers Blog

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