Is DevOps Right For You?

You keep hearing DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering etc. But do you even know what it is, what is that we actually do?

I will talk about the basics of why we exist, whats the point and if this is right for you?

What even is DevOps?

DevOps is an idea, you may hear tools like kubernetes, docker or terraform. But these tools don't make DevOps, the lifecycle of devops comes from the people in the teams that allow us to work towards combing (DEV) developement and (OPS) operations to streamline the work flow of developing software and we are able to be then faster and more reliable when doing so

SWE vs DevOps Engineer

As a software developer you main focus is developing the software, you could be building from scratch or you could be maintaining or adding a new feature, your job mostly here is coding, whether thats front-end, backend, java or anything. You mostly work on delivering a product and you stakeholders are people who would use the product

But for DevOps your stakeholders actually are the devs, your method to setup infrastructure or build kubernetes clusters or set up CI/CD pipelines, you are doing this so you make the dev's life easier, you make it better for them to be able to ship products and features faster.

Do I need to even code?

Yes, maybe not as much, and not very deeply but coding is necessary here too. The days of ClickOps ( Using UI and clicking buttons ), are gone, we run everything via code, IaC (Infrastructure as Code), you have kubernetes yaml files and helm charts. CI/CD pipelines need you to do bash or python scripting. You can use Go as well for specific tasks that require performance.

Should I do DevOps?

I can't answer this for you, you are your own person and you have to really understand what actually is it you want to learn and do.

Note: This is super important, normally DevOps and SRE work is not really suited for fresh grads or people with little industry experience. It doesn't mean you can't get into it, it just means you have to work a little harder. Doing things like having a homelab or finding ways to get experience first, if you are interested in homelabbing you should read my post about why someone would homelab

If you are someone who is more interested in Linux, more interested in cloud or you don't feel like SWE suits you, this may be the right route. You could also go towards things like Sysadmin or Network engineer work but DevOps has a good balance of being close to dev work while mixing ops into it.

The work type is every changing and your problem solving skills are really put to the test because problems become very unique to each use case, and one of the bigger things is the tech is ever changing, you need to up-skill yourself multiple times for different companies even because each process method is different. Can you also manage multiple projects and different tasks at the same time.

All these questions feel scary, feel like you shouldn't but, its super rewarding work, your work is immediately rewarded because what you build most of the time is deployed and you will have immediate feedback for your work ( and also when things break😂 ). You also are going to be paid higher because you skill is more important. You are the glue making sure that everything you build is making the company more money faster

Why I chose SRE/DevOps?

To be honest, I didn't even know I could do this work last year, but something clicked with me when I started to research and play around with the tools, that I really found this work enjoyable, I liked coding but for me just doing AI work of SWE work felt super repetitive and boring, no hate to whoever likes it but it just didn't fit anymore. I enjoyed all of this when I was studying but slowly I just didn't know what to do

So to test if this was right for me, I just chose to deep dive DevOps, built my Proxmox homelab and just kept going, then I moved to Kubernetes. The whole time I loved what I was doing and it was so much fun. It may not be exactly what you do in a company but it gives you a good idea of how the tools work and forces you to solve your own real problem.

You need to learn to do something real, something that shows for a long enough period of time Around 3 months at least, you are able to work on something and show something that people actually use or you use or you solve some problem. This help so much because you then actually have something to reference in an interview that shows you had problems and you learnt how to solve it, rather than doing a 1 month school project or following a Youtube tutorial

I hope this helps you feel a little more confident on whether this is the right choice for you. Feel free to drop a comment or msg me on any platform if you need more advice or feel like you want to add to more I have written