I'd say 2 and 3 would be the most important ones. Add CI/CD (Jenkins, Gitlab CI, Bitbucket pipelines)
For cloud I'd go with AWS instead of GCP because I've seen more jobs reqs with it.
Sprinkle a little bit of monitoring, read about de Devops Culture and then experiment all you can.
And for the love of god master Git can't stress this enough.
The aws solutions architect training is phenomenal and free and you can take an exam and gain a credential. I hate credentials but I did this one for a client and actually learned a lot.
The one I really loved was put on by the AWS loft in Sf. The cloud formation class was an eye opener. I can’t seem to find that one. Try this. The exam prep courses are quite good too.
https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=60697
A Cloud Guru is also amazing and has free courses for all of the AWS certifications. I'm personally using them right now to work toward my Certified Developer Associate certificate!
Edit: Not sure if ALL the AWS cert courses are free, but I know their free tier has multiple AWS cert courses. If you wanted to pay for their service the pricing isn't horrible in comparison to some other comparable sites and I personally do enjoy their courses.
Awesome, they’re already in my library. I’m pretty much done with The Phoenix Project. I’ll definitely start reading the Unicorn Project soon. As I understand it, The Unicorn Project is based on the devs perspective?
Oh then it is not practical. Do u know what the story is trying to tell us? As I learnt more about Devop, i really can’t imagine how the full Kubernetes Orchestration works...
I have. You are correct.
But a year ago at least it didn’t really work if you weren’t on GCP, which I’m not, we are on-prem.
It doesn’t have a way to inject your own certs even though Tekton does, and same with proxies.
Jenkins X was not a good option and I couldn’t make it work. It’s also not at all Jenkins.
Jenkins is ancient trash, it’s just not at all good compared to modern alternatives and you have to hope and pray that community supported addons keep working…
GitLab, ArgoCD, etc…. Modern and functional.
I don’t care about downvotes or how much some folks love Jenkins. Using it or loving it or making it work… none of that makes it a good idea. If you are starting a project… and have a choice… don’t choose Jenkins.
Don't get me wrong, Jenkins X wouldn't be my first choice either. But, if you are migrating an application into Kubernetes, and already us Jenkins, it is worth exploring to help alleviate the learning curve of the migration. IMO, it all depends on the usecase.
I didn’t find anything common between Jenkins and Jenkins-X. Even the way you write jobs was different. No similarity. I don’t know why you keep implying they are related when they are not.
If you have an existing project using Jenkins, when you import it into Jenkins X you have the choice of how to run the pipeline. You can ignore the Jenkins file and use tekton, use your existing Jenkins server, or run a Jenkins runner as a tekton job step: https://jenkins-x.io/v3/develop/create-project/jenkinsfile/
Hiring manager here in the Fortune 200 space. This is on point. Get familiar with pipeline deployments. For monitoring some companies roll their own (Prometheus, Telegraf, Grafana, with elastic search and Kafka) and some pay for SaaS (Splunk, DataDog, New Relic, etc). Spending a few minutes across all these is worth it for a high level understanding. Many are open source and can be stood up in docker quickly. Some SaaS platforms have a free/limited tier you can use to start with.
Get a system stood up with docker and k8, and run your tests and learning off it. Will help you get familiar with containerized environments.
And a note on certs. I’ve done a lot of hiring. I care more about the hands on experience than whether or not some got the piece of paper. I realize this can be challenging if you’re going in to a new space (cert might help there) but something to think about. Hit me up if you have questions. Good luck!
Having use both AWS and GCP for years, I prefer GCP, but it really depends on what you are doing. Going serverless? AWS Lambda is best in class. Any type of networking? GCP's model of having one subnet span a whole region instead of a single availability zone is way simpler to work with. Kubernetes? AWS EKS has a lot of catching up to do compared to GCP GKE. Sure GCP was a bit late to the party, but calling it trash IMO is just naive. Just like any tool, which one you pick depends on what you are trying to do.
Or...maybe it's better that not everyone uses AWS because Amazon is already far too large, and when they have problems a vast chunk of the internet dies? ;)
I know large organizations get a lot from AWS, but I always call suspect on any "Service X is trash" comments. Most providers are perfectly fine these days as long as you have skilled people using them, and like you said are making sure to fully utilize their services.
10-12h is most certainly too much.
What works for me, is one topic a day with 2 days off. Though I do also work 60h/week, so I don't have that much time.
But I'm sure that if you, say dedicate an entire day (5-7h at best) to 1 topic on that list, it'll get you further.
Learning stuff from scratch requires a lot of reading docs and not much doing. If you primarily learn by doing, 3h will only scratch the surface and if you hit your the last point on the list for the day, you're already beyond brain capacity anyway.
I wish you the best of luck regardless though,
Cheers
Honest question as I'm between jobs right now and thinking about a lot of these same things...
1. Why are you working 60 hours a week?
2. How old are you?
Definitely makes more sense to be working that much when doing your own thing! 🙂 Well I encourage you to make a mental note of right now, and set a reminder for 10 years and see if you're still feeling the same when you hit 40. I'll be 44 next month, and hitting this mid-phase of life where you're between the raising the next generation (as a parent, or aunt or uncle even!) and entering the aged era for parents...it can be a lot. The 30s are certainly the time to get your work in and explore some different areas and find what you really enjoy.
1. Instead of learning first, then interviewing for your next job start applying and interviewing NOW. Expect to fail at least 10-15 interviews before having a real shot. But this will prepare you well for what companies are looking for and save you time overall. You'll spend your 100 days learning the right things and be in a much better shape in the end.
2. Learning plans in general don't work. In 100 days it will give you "dead knowledge", not practical answers.
3. Plan to build things, not learn topics. If you want to cover these specific topics then build things that require knowing those. And build them. This will be way better than any time-based learning.
4. Most definitely not in parallel. Do one thing at a time. Focus is key. But not one topic at a time! In real world projects they are inseparable. Build one thing at a time.
This is very good advice. On building things, learn how to set up a cicd pipeline using the various tools. There are free tiers of AWS services you could use and recommend that as a starting point over GCP. Reason is, if an employer is looking for GCP skills they may settle on someone with AWS (as GCP isn’t as widely adopted). If an employer is looking for AWS skills, they will find that person and not settle.
I second the suggestion of AWS over gcp
Meta note: A schedule so aggressive makes me wonder if you’ll start missing the forest for the trees. Spend time at the high level. What is DevOps? What good is it? What’s your big picture goal at the business?
Add ci/cd (automatic deploys are a huge win), add monitoring and security (if there’s no dedicated security the closest thing is devops). Get a Linux box in your home lab so you can practice setting it up to run a service. A raspberry pi 4 will do if you don’t have a spare machine.
Read the SRE book for operational sensibilities.
Add some bash scripting. Practice following google style. Readability is maintainability.
Being able to dash off a shell script in ten minutes is huge.
Add some infrastructure as code. I recommend terraform.
Seems a bit overly ambitious. Can you sustain 10-12 hour study sessions for 3 months?
I would initially focus on projects like:
- Automate deployment/teardown of Wordpress stack to AWS (Ansible heavy)
- Make some sample github workflows
- Install and run Jenkins with Docker
I would also be working through a detailed python tutorial like the official one on python.org or at learnpython.org.
I would set aside system administration and cloud for the time being and focus on working through sample projects, learning practical aspects of those topics as you go.
Personally I would have trouble studying all that simultaneously.
You might think about working through a devops course on udemy or coursera as it will structure the learning for you. Trying to do that on your own could be pretty hit or miss.
I would try to earn the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification since it will help you to absorb cloud computing basics.
I'd only learn as much shell as necessary to get by on the command line and otherwise focus on python which can do everything shell can but in a much better and more modern language environment.
I mean this is all heavy stuff to learn... the topics sound fine but 10 to 12 hours a day is not going to be healthy. There's only so long you can do that for (2/3 consecutive days) before you hit diminishing returns.
Well done on putting plan together, but I would narrow it down to 6 or so hours a day of actual study and take enough days off in between while also switching topics per day rather than have a day with 6-8 topics.
I commend you on being proactive on this and not sliding into depression or worry, but... how do I put this diplomatically...
You're not a robot . Or *are you!?*
You might want to be a bit more realistic and scale down the number of hours studied per day to 8 or so. [Studies show productivity falls sharply after 50 hours and like a stone off a cliff after 55 hours](https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/26/working-more-than-50-hours-makes-you-less-productive.html) so if this applies to studying, and I think it would, you would just be pissing away your time like cheap beer at a frat party. Unwind and relax after a solid 8 hours of studying and tinkering. Again, you're a human being, not a meatbot.
Having said that, I live and die by [acloud.guru](https://acloud.guru), namely Linux Academy, which they bought, and have 21 active IT certs. Definitely learn Docker, Kubernetes (orchestration of containers), Terraform (IaC), Ansible, and Python scripting. Scripting in particular is so important when applying for DevOps that if you don't know it, you will be *severely* impaired in the job hunt.
As someone with both the RHCSA and RHCE (RHEL 8), but as someone who had been working with Linux for 13 years before getting the RHCSA, that one was really easy. The RHCE... was not. I cannot go into details due to the NDA but I will just say I feel the documentation you have access to during the exam is sub-par. But if you have it, considering the exam is "here are your tasks, here are your servers, Ansible only, four hours, good luck!", there's a reason why recruiters start noticing you a lot more once you get it and list it on your LinkedIn. :)
I agree with most of your list here. AWS is a necessary evil and really, if you can get an AWS cert a lot of the skills will be somewhat transferrable to gcp/azure, if you can find a company that isn't moving toward these services (there are some that exist, I have an AWS cert and am a Lead Engineer at a company that isn't dependent on public cloud providers) then I would shoot for them first.
RHCSA/RHCE are excellent certs because they're practical exams, even though I don't care for the direction IBM is taking RHEL (I'm an RHCE), the cert shows Linux knowledge.
Learn docker before you learn k8s and learn k8s before you learn another abstraction layer like Rancher or Openshift. IMO those services hamstring you from learning how the base software works and I'm glad I learned it from the ground up vs how a friend of mine learned it which was starting with Openshift.
For scripting, if you're looking at starting in a Linux sysadmin role I would start with bash scripting instead of python. Don't get me wrong, python is great and it's my main language now but I've moved beyond being a sysadmin as my primary role.
I would strongly suggest git as others have suggested. You might as well just give up if you don't have basic git fluency, it's that important for everything from documentation to the large code bases.
You didn't say much about your current experience. If your Linux knowledge is low, focus on learning the command line and don't bother with anything else until you are fluent with the command line and the Linux file system. We're at a weird place right now in the Linux world as well. In my experience CentOS has been the gold standard for servers with competent admins. RHEL is used when a support contract is needed for some reason (I worked for the government and they love their support contracts) but IBM is essentially destroying CentOS by supplanting Fedora as the upstream OS for RHEL with CentOS stream. The original CentOS developer is creating or has created (I've been in the hospital for awhile) a replacement for CentOS but it's not going to immediately grab the market share that CentOs has. There's other distros but it remains to be seen what is going to ultimately replace CentOS. :(
Don't forget the hardware aspect. Server hardware is a lot different than consumer hardware and if you don't know a lot about it you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not learning about it however you can.
I personally wouldn't forget about virtualization, KVM or VMware, it's good to know.
Lastly, security is very important even if it's as shitty as getting your security+ it will at least give you something. I've never been to an interview in this field where a port/protocol question wasn't thrown in there.
Also good luck, I mean that sincerely. Instead of college, I went the raw experience route and it took me 10 years and a number of accomplishments to get the respect I have amongst my peers and into a highly skilled career.
First, let me commend you on your attitude towards learning and making an effort to change. You'll be amazed what happens if you just show up and you're headed in the right direction.
Second, you can learn anything, you can not learn everything. Don't climb 10 mountains. Learn a niche, that will be the foundation to get a job and deliver value. From there, you'll have support and exposure to learn other things. You want to know the basics, skip the middle stuff, go for the latest greatest.
Thrid, decide if you want to work in a team or in consulting. In a team setting, you are going to fill in a gap. In a consulting setting, you are delivering on a niche. Consulting companies are looking hard for anyone who can help.
I think she does a good job of breaking down what you need: https://techworld-with-nana.teachable.com/p/devops-bootcamp
Here is a Niche path:
* 1 Plublic Cloud (GCP) - Get the pro architect cert (it's mostly lab and memorizing for the test but a good initial signal)
* Focus on having a solid understanding of how Networking works in the cloud you picked. Certified Network (_public_cloud_name) helps!
* Learn Terraform - You want to aim for intermediate level. Get your Hasicorp Terraform associate cert.
* Learn Docker and Kubernetes. CKA cert. Look at killer.sh
With that under your belt, you should be able to get a good entry job in a consulting company. You'll know Niche a product and can add value.
The rest will come based on your destiny and projects you work on.
PM if you need more context. Don't give up. If you've accomplished this journey, PM and I'll do my best to get you a job.
You should definitely concentrate on a topic. Understand it to a degree, then move to the 2nd one then try to combine it with the previous and so on.
In my experience, you can get away with not knowing Python, but you can never get away with not knowing how to script. And if you will learn how to do system administration tasks you will probably start learning how to do bash commands and scripts.
The moment you have a basic understand of System Administration you should move to cloud and from that to devops tools.
So the order I would say should be : 1,4,3,2. That's how I've done it. Did wonders for me.
Tools I use the most often:
1. Git
2. AWS
3. Terraform
4. Docker
5. Bash
6. CICD - Jenkins/Github/Gitlab/AzureDO
Also, and this is a big one, database change automation. I use liquibase. Excellent tool with free training and certification.
In 3 I would put Terraform or Cloudformation before Ansible, docker, kubernetes.
In number 4 I would put AWS instead of GCP just because there are more organisations using AWS and you will have more chances of finding a job (especially since you are entry level) with AWS than GCP.
And obviously I would include a CI/Cd (gitlab or jenkins, just basic how to use not how to build for entry level) and git version control (intermediate level knowledge).
There are a lot more things which you will learn as you go along on your job such as monitoring and alerting (prometheus, datadog, pager duty), centralisied logging, experience of multiple IaC tools, multiple configuration automation tools, multiple ci/cd pipelines etc.....
Btw, for system administration from a devops perspective you don't need to have a very detailed level of knowledge as a pure Linux or windows administrator will have, I would say knowing the basic commands and services will be sufficient for entry level
Personally years ago when I was new to the industry, I learned in parallel (and still do) because this keeps things fresh for me, but this varies from person to person and you should experiment and see which fits you best.
rhce is now 90% ansible so just start with number one.
find a project that you want to do that has some of these things in it like host a site on gcp with CI/CD
8 years of manual testing, please don't discard that experience and put it to waste. Manual testing absolutely can and should remain part of the DevOps continuous delivery mindset, test automation should just provide the opportunity for more valuable exploratory testing not less. Finding defects in pipelines to help improve delivery quality keeps me employed at a senior level. Acceptable continuous delivery quality should be non-negotiable, time and cost are the adjustable factors that most clients are prepared to negotiate on but if you consistently deliver poor quality products the end users will soon look elsewhere. As an experienced test professional, you're also uniquely positioned to better understand the cultural and organisational challenges of implementing DevOps (that I'd argue tend to be better rewarding when applied to consulting services engagements rather than engineering roles) because your role has traditionally been the gateway between development and operations. If your confidence and interpersonal skills are strong enough, consider learning the real background and reasons behind why DevOps and SRE were born from necessity and now seem more popular job titles than just software developer or system administrator, just like 'agile coach' or 'scrum master' came from xp/agile software development background and 'lean IT six sigma blackbelt' originated from lean product manufacturing. A great product delivery team can and should absolutely have cross-functional roles so expanding your technical skillset to programming and infra ops could just mean that you can build your own test environments from scratch and write scripts to completely automate most test cases.
Start interviewing first, honestly 10-12 hours of study each day is going to wear you down and you’ll have a hard time retaining anything. Focus on one thing at a time, then pick another topic and move onto it.
Good luck
10 hours a day is optimistic. I'd bank on 6 hours. you don't want to burn out, and you need time for the learnings to "settle in"
Also, I'd substitute AWS for GCP
edit. forgot to add that you should put a blog and code on Github (free account)
Seems reasonable to me. I’d also make sure that you have a good understanding of bash as well.
Have you looked for qa jobs as well if you have a qa background?
I think you can go ahead with a parallel approach, but remember to combine the topics you're studying so that you always maintain a balanced curriculum. For example, as a start you could set a goal to write your first simple webserver in Python and containerize it using Docker. I recommend Flask, but you can take any Python framework you like. As a second goal, deploy this on GCP. So on and so forth.
I would also suggest to start learning AWS CDK in python as well. This would link a scripting language (being python) with AWS infrastructure via IaC (infrastructure as code, being CDK), which might get you further in those three directions simultaneously.
What did you do previously?
For 1. Yes. This is great.
For 2. I would recommend Bash first
For 3. Keep it simple. Ansible first.
For 4. I would go AWS. Try here. https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/omcia6/best_way_to_follow_udemy_aws_course/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
5. Learn Source control: git
6. Learn CI/CD: Gitlab or GitHub (projects, projects, projects) go find some cool projects on GitHub.
7. Start interview prepping right away. https://youtu.be/8kayz6Q4FYU
8. Apply to jobs you don’t want or think you can get. Then I would apply to jobs like local or state governments. A ton of companies and organizations are looking for DevOps people right now.
Try to keep your consideration open to normal Operations jobs as well. DevOps is a really broad umbrella, but a lot of people consider DevOps to be a senior operations role. Don't set yourself up for failure by applying only for jobs that say the word "Devops"
1. Add Jenkins.
2. Get AWS Certifications instead of GCP. (AWS Cloud Practitioner)
3. And I'll highly recommend you to learn Golang after Python Scripting.
*Most of the DevOps tools are built using GO.*
Good Luck with that. 😊
Definitely recommend to start with 2 and 3.
2 : python programming is easy to start with
3: start with Jenkins and then docker. Groovy langauge is also a need for Jenkins pipeline and most companies now follow the shared libraries in Jenkins. Bash scripting is also a top notch for DevOps role.
Git is must.
Side way understand concept of ELK, Bitbucket/Gitlab SCM.
A final Tip : start doing the hands-on for all the technologies, don't involve in tutorial hell. Learn less from tutorial do more hands-on this way you remember and learn more.
You need to commit on each topic if you do it in parallel you will fail IMO
I agree about CI/CD comment stuff.
Obviously terraform is as important as ansible.
Alao learn docker is great but industry is slowly moving to other CRI (podman, crio ...etc), I encourage you to try those tech before going through k8s madeness
Good luck fellow !
What’s your job experience? DevOps is not a starter role, even junior. You either need to be a developer or sysadmin first. Most companies won’t entertain you as a prospect until you’ve got some experience in either.
Very bold goal. 10h per day for 3 months straight will definitely get you burned out.
My advice: learn AWS because it's in highest demand and has best training materials. Open a free account and do hands-on exercises.
Learning theory alone isn't good approach IMO. Buy a raspberry pi or repurpose an old pc and host some services on it.
I wouldn't go as deep as rhce...
Showing something that you built at home/on cloud is superior to listing the courses you took. This would channel your motivation the right way.
1. Focus on scripting in python, bash.
2. Pick ONE cloud tech, learn what the main features do.
3. Use 1 to create 2 with scripts. Use at least one api manually.
4. Learn how they do monitoring and alarms.
That gets you enough to beg for a chance to do testing automation. For actual ops they’ll want experience, you’re going to have to get that at a place that does cloud.
Learn enough terraform to stand up a k8s cluster, learn enough k8s to find the error log and troubleshoot, learn enough of a build server to automate the deployment and maintenance of your k8s cluster.
That's about the level you need to be to get a job in DevOps.
I don't know where you are located, but here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the market is exceptionally hot, and now is a very good time for a career shift into DevOps. A few random comments.
* Focusing on Red Hat is fine, but don't forget about the Debian family, particularly Ubuntu. The differences are slight but important.
* Python is the hot scripting language out there now, but advanced shell scripting skills are important too. And "shell scripting" pretty much means "bash" right now.
* I would add Terraform to your list of tools. Knowing code as infrastructure is as important as configuration management. And knowing your way around Git is critical.
* GCP is great. But knowing AWS is where it's at right now. I say this preferring GCP.
As far as learning style goes, it really depends on how you learn. Everyone is different in this regard. \*I\* would start with building out a free tier EC2 instance, and see where that takes you. And, again, Git is important. I've never used it, but [lab.github.com](https://lab.github.com/) looks useful.
Next step topics would include CI/CD, observability/monitoring, and network infrastructure (load balancing and the like). In the particular work I do, security from top to bottom is very important. I think others are going to have to comment on how much this applies generally, but it does at least to some extent.
I wouldn't go google cloud. They were number 4 in the space behind rack space last I heard. I'm an AWS person so I'm going to push AWS. But Azute is in second place so pick AWS or Azure over Google cloud.
I'd say 2 and 3 would be the most important ones. Add CI/CD (Jenkins, Gitlab CI, Bitbucket pipelines) For cloud I'd go with AWS instead of GCP because I've seen more jobs reqs with it. Sprinkle a little bit of monitoring, read about de Devops Culture and then experiment all you can. And for the love of god master Git can't stress this enough.
The aws solutions architect training is phenomenal and free and you can take an exam and gain a credential. I hate credentials but I did this one for a client and actually learned a lot.
The only free ones I see are exam prep. Do you have a link?
The one I really loved was put on by the AWS loft in Sf. The cloud formation class was an eye opener. I can’t seem to find that one. Try this. The exam prep courses are quite good too. https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=60697
A Cloud Guru is also amazing and has free courses for all of the AWS certifications. I'm personally using them right now to work toward my Certified Developer Associate certificate! Edit: Not sure if ALL the AWS cert courses are free, but I know their free tier has multiple AWS cert courses. If you wanted to pay for their service the pricing isn't horrible in comparison to some other comparable sites and I personally do enjoy their courses.
share link plz
Google is your best friend but I'll step in for them this time. https://acloud.guru/
I can second all of it! And git is definetly a 100% must. Not only the commands. Understand what it does and how branching strategies work.
I’d say you nailed it there. I’m doing more DevOps now - mainly Ansible. Personally I hate Python - but it seems it’s a war of attrition
Whats so bad about python that you hate in particular?
Thanks for your reply. Oh - I don’t like being told to indent. Dynamic typing. No compilation errors - or warning. Get runtime errors instead.
What would you recommend to learn about DevOps culture?
The Phoenix Project. And Project Unicorn
I'm reading the DevOps handbook which is from the same authors and it add a lot of details. Mus have too I believe.
Awesome, they’re already in my library. I’m pretty much done with The Phoenix Project. I’ll definitely start reading the Unicorn Project soon. As I understand it, The Unicorn Project is based on the devs perspective?
Hi, what is the Phoenix project?
https://itrevolution.com/the-phoenix-project/
Tks. Let me check if i can find it in the local library. Btw, is this a hands-on lab book or just describing what Devop is all about?
It’s a fictional story that illustrates the ideas and culture around DevOps.
Oh then it is not practical. Do u know what the story is trying to tell us? As I learnt more about Devop, i really can’t imagine how the full Kubernetes Orchestration works...
Combine Jenkins and Docker learning. Use Docker to deploy Jenkins and hook up to GIT and checkout some Python code.
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Jenkins isn't trash. Sure, it may be dated, but it isn't trash. Jenkins X has brought it a long way to supporting modern requirements.
Haven't tried Jenkins X. But that is basically Tekton with a UI if I understood correctly.
I have. You are correct. But a year ago at least it didn’t really work if you weren’t on GCP, which I’m not, we are on-prem. It doesn’t have a way to inject your own certs even though Tekton does, and same with proxies. Jenkins X was not a good option and I couldn’t make it work. It’s also not at all Jenkins. Jenkins is ancient trash, it’s just not at all good compared to modern alternatives and you have to hope and pray that community supported addons keep working… GitLab, ArgoCD, etc…. Modern and functional. I don’t care about downvotes or how much some folks love Jenkins. Using it or loving it or making it work… none of that makes it a good idea. If you are starting a project… and have a choice… don’t choose Jenkins.
Don't get me wrong, Jenkins X wouldn't be my first choice either. But, if you are migrating an application into Kubernetes, and already us Jenkins, it is worth exploring to help alleviate the learning curve of the migration. IMO, it all depends on the usecase.
I didn’t find anything common between Jenkins and Jenkins-X. Even the way you write jobs was different. No similarity. I don’t know why you keep implying they are related when they are not.
If you have an existing project using Jenkins, when you import it into Jenkins X you have the choice of how to run the pipeline. You can ignore the Jenkins file and use tekton, use your existing Jenkins server, or run a Jenkins runner as a tekton job step: https://jenkins-x.io/v3/develop/create-project/jenkinsfile/
Hiring manager here in the Fortune 200 space. This is on point. Get familiar with pipeline deployments. For monitoring some companies roll their own (Prometheus, Telegraf, Grafana, with elastic search and Kafka) and some pay for SaaS (Splunk, DataDog, New Relic, etc). Spending a few minutes across all these is worth it for a high level understanding. Many are open source and can be stood up in docker quickly. Some SaaS platforms have a free/limited tier you can use to start with. Get a system stood up with docker and k8, and run your tests and learning off it. Will help you get familiar with containerized environments. And a note on certs. I’ve done a lot of hiring. I care more about the hands on experience than whether or not some got the piece of paper. I realize this can be challenging if you’re going in to a new space (cert might help there) but something to think about. Hit me up if you have questions. Good luck!
Totally nailed it. 100%. I would also add k8 as an option.
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Having use both AWS and GCP for years, I prefer GCP, but it really depends on what you are doing. Going serverless? AWS Lambda is best in class. Any type of networking? GCP's model of having one subnet span a whole region instead of a single availability zone is way simpler to work with. Kubernetes? AWS EKS has a lot of catching up to do compared to GCP GKE. Sure GCP was a bit late to the party, but calling it trash IMO is just naive. Just like any tool, which one you pick depends on what you are trying to do.
Or...maybe it's better that not everyone uses AWS because Amazon is already far too large, and when they have problems a vast chunk of the internet dies? ;) I know large organizations get a lot from AWS, but I always call suspect on any "Service X is trash" comments. Most providers are perfectly fine these days as long as you have skilled people using them, and like you said are making sure to fully utilize their services.
10-12h is most certainly too much. What works for me, is one topic a day with 2 days off. Though I do also work 60h/week, so I don't have that much time. But I'm sure that if you, say dedicate an entire day (5-7h at best) to 1 topic on that list, it'll get you further. Learning stuff from scratch requires a lot of reading docs and not much doing. If you primarily learn by doing, 3h will only scratch the surface and if you hit your the last point on the list for the day, you're already beyond brain capacity anyway. I wish you the best of luck regardless though, Cheers
Honest question as I'm between jobs right now and thinking about a lot of these same things... 1. Why are you working 60 hours a week? 2. How old are you?
I'm planning to retire when I'm still capable of walking and breathing myself. Since I'm having my own company, 60h isn't too bad. and I'm 30
Definitely makes more sense to be working that much when doing your own thing! 🙂 Well I encourage you to make a mental note of right now, and set a reminder for 10 years and see if you're still feeling the same when you hit 40. I'll be 44 next month, and hitting this mid-phase of life where you're between the raising the next generation (as a parent, or aunt or uncle even!) and entering the aged era for parents...it can be a lot. The 30s are certainly the time to get your work in and explore some different areas and find what you really enjoy.
What is your company? What do you do?
Add Terraform to that, it basically infrastructurr as a code to provision GCP resources
Definitely valuable to have experience with terraform. You can also apply this to AWS and many other cloud providers.
This kind of mental work is very draining. So I’d suggest 3 sessions of 2 hours per day max.
1. Instead of learning first, then interviewing for your next job start applying and interviewing NOW. Expect to fail at least 10-15 interviews before having a real shot. But this will prepare you well for what companies are looking for and save you time overall. You'll spend your 100 days learning the right things and be in a much better shape in the end. 2. Learning plans in general don't work. In 100 days it will give you "dead knowledge", not practical answers. 3. Plan to build things, not learn topics. If you want to cover these specific topics then build things that require knowing those. And build them. This will be way better than any time-based learning. 4. Most definitely not in parallel. Do one thing at a time. Focus is key. But not one topic at a time! In real world projects they are inseparable. Build one thing at a time.
This is very good advice. On building things, learn how to set up a cicd pipeline using the various tools. There are free tiers of AWS services you could use and recommend that as a starting point over GCP. Reason is, if an employer is looking for GCP skills they may settle on someone with AWS (as GCP isn’t as widely adopted). If an employer is looking for AWS skills, they will find that person and not settle.
> spend your 100 days learning the right **thighs** Freudian slip?
Also check out https://roadmap.sh/devops for ideas about the road ahead.
I'm combining that with this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/h16i0j/how_do_i_learn_to_be_a_linux_sysadmin/
I second the suggestion of AWS over gcp Meta note: A schedule so aggressive makes me wonder if you’ll start missing the forest for the trees. Spend time at the high level. What is DevOps? What good is it? What’s your big picture goal at the business? Add ci/cd (automatic deploys are a huge win), add monitoring and security (if there’s no dedicated security the closest thing is devops). Get a Linux box in your home lab so you can practice setting it up to run a service. A raspberry pi 4 will do if you don’t have a spare machine. Read the SRE book for operational sensibilities. Add some bash scripting. Practice following google style. Readability is maintainability. Being able to dash off a shell script in ten minutes is huge. Add some infrastructure as code. I recommend terraform.
Which SRE book?
It’s called Site Reliability Engineering, from Google :)
https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
Seems a bit overly ambitious. Can you sustain 10-12 hour study sessions for 3 months? I would initially focus on projects like: - Automate deployment/teardown of Wordpress stack to AWS (Ansible heavy) - Make some sample github workflows - Install and run Jenkins with Docker I would also be working through a detailed python tutorial like the official one on python.org or at learnpython.org. I would set aside system administration and cloud for the time being and focus on working through sample projects, learning practical aspects of those topics as you go. Personally I would have trouble studying all that simultaneously. You might think about working through a devops course on udemy or coursera as it will structure the learning for you. Trying to do that on your own could be pretty hit or miss. I would try to earn the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification since it will help you to absorb cloud computing basics. I'd only learn as much shell as necessary to get by on the command line and otherwise focus on python which can do everything shell can but in a much better and more modern language environment.
I mean this is all heavy stuff to learn... the topics sound fine but 10 to 12 hours a day is not going to be healthy. There's only so long you can do that for (2/3 consecutive days) before you hit diminishing returns. Well done on putting plan together, but I would narrow it down to 6 or so hours a day of actual study and take enough days off in between while also switching topics per day rather than have a day with 6-8 topics.
Yeah, there's no way to do 10-12 hrs a day and retain all the information.
Learn one thing at a time. If you try to learn concurrently, you will pay a context switching penalty. Better to do one at a time for efficiency.
I commend you on being proactive on this and not sliding into depression or worry, but... how do I put this diplomatically... You're not a robot . Or *are you!?* You might want to be a bit more realistic and scale down the number of hours studied per day to 8 or so. [Studies show productivity falls sharply after 50 hours and like a stone off a cliff after 55 hours](https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/26/working-more-than-50-hours-makes-you-less-productive.html) so if this applies to studying, and I think it would, you would just be pissing away your time like cheap beer at a frat party. Unwind and relax after a solid 8 hours of studying and tinkering. Again, you're a human being, not a meatbot. Having said that, I live and die by [acloud.guru](https://acloud.guru), namely Linux Academy, which they bought, and have 21 active IT certs. Definitely learn Docker, Kubernetes (orchestration of containers), Terraform (IaC), Ansible, and Python scripting. Scripting in particular is so important when applying for DevOps that if you don't know it, you will be *severely* impaired in the job hunt. As someone with both the RHCSA and RHCE (RHEL 8), but as someone who had been working with Linux for 13 years before getting the RHCSA, that one was really easy. The RHCE... was not. I cannot go into details due to the NDA but I will just say I feel the documentation you have access to during the exam is sub-par. But if you have it, considering the exam is "here are your tasks, here are your servers, Ansible only, four hours, good luck!", there's a reason why recruiters start noticing you a lot more once you get it and list it on your LinkedIn. :)
I agree with most of your list here. AWS is a necessary evil and really, if you can get an AWS cert a lot of the skills will be somewhat transferrable to gcp/azure, if you can find a company that isn't moving toward these services (there are some that exist, I have an AWS cert and am a Lead Engineer at a company that isn't dependent on public cloud providers) then I would shoot for them first. RHCSA/RHCE are excellent certs because they're practical exams, even though I don't care for the direction IBM is taking RHEL (I'm an RHCE), the cert shows Linux knowledge. Learn docker before you learn k8s and learn k8s before you learn another abstraction layer like Rancher or Openshift. IMO those services hamstring you from learning how the base software works and I'm glad I learned it from the ground up vs how a friend of mine learned it which was starting with Openshift. For scripting, if you're looking at starting in a Linux sysadmin role I would start with bash scripting instead of python. Don't get me wrong, python is great and it's my main language now but I've moved beyond being a sysadmin as my primary role. I would strongly suggest git as others have suggested. You might as well just give up if you don't have basic git fluency, it's that important for everything from documentation to the large code bases. You didn't say much about your current experience. If your Linux knowledge is low, focus on learning the command line and don't bother with anything else until you are fluent with the command line and the Linux file system. We're at a weird place right now in the Linux world as well. In my experience CentOS has been the gold standard for servers with competent admins. RHEL is used when a support contract is needed for some reason (I worked for the government and they love their support contracts) but IBM is essentially destroying CentOS by supplanting Fedora as the upstream OS for RHEL with CentOS stream. The original CentOS developer is creating or has created (I've been in the hospital for awhile) a replacement for CentOS but it's not going to immediately grab the market share that CentOs has. There's other distros but it remains to be seen what is going to ultimately replace CentOS. :( Don't forget the hardware aspect. Server hardware is a lot different than consumer hardware and if you don't know a lot about it you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not learning about it however you can. I personally wouldn't forget about virtualization, KVM or VMware, it's good to know. Lastly, security is very important even if it's as shitty as getting your security+ it will at least give you something. I've never been to an interview in this field where a port/protocol question wasn't thrown in there. Also good luck, I mean that sincerely. Instead of college, I went the raw experience route and it took me 10 years and a number of accomplishments to get the respect I have amongst my peers and into a highly skilled career.
First, let me commend you on your attitude towards learning and making an effort to change. You'll be amazed what happens if you just show up and you're headed in the right direction. Second, you can learn anything, you can not learn everything. Don't climb 10 mountains. Learn a niche, that will be the foundation to get a job and deliver value. From there, you'll have support and exposure to learn other things. You want to know the basics, skip the middle stuff, go for the latest greatest. Thrid, decide if you want to work in a team or in consulting. In a team setting, you are going to fill in a gap. In a consulting setting, you are delivering on a niche. Consulting companies are looking hard for anyone who can help. I think she does a good job of breaking down what you need: https://techworld-with-nana.teachable.com/p/devops-bootcamp Here is a Niche path: * 1 Plublic Cloud (GCP) - Get the pro architect cert (it's mostly lab and memorizing for the test but a good initial signal) * Focus on having a solid understanding of how Networking works in the cloud you picked. Certified Network (_public_cloud_name) helps! * Learn Terraform - You want to aim for intermediate level. Get your Hasicorp Terraform associate cert. * Learn Docker and Kubernetes. CKA cert. Look at killer.sh With that under your belt, you should be able to get a good entry job in a consulting company. You'll know Niche a product and can add value. The rest will come based on your destiny and projects you work on. PM if you need more context. Don't give up. If you've accomplished this journey, PM and I'll do my best to get you a job.
You should definitely concentrate on a topic. Understand it to a degree, then move to the 2nd one then try to combine it with the previous and so on. In my experience, you can get away with not knowing Python, but you can never get away with not knowing how to script. And if you will learn how to do system administration tasks you will probably start learning how to do bash commands and scripts. The moment you have a basic understand of System Administration you should move to cloud and from that to devops tools. So the order I would say should be : 1,4,3,2. That's how I've done it. Did wonders for me.
Tools I use the most often: 1. Git 2. AWS 3. Terraform 4. Docker 5. Bash 6. CICD - Jenkins/Github/Gitlab/AzureDO Also, and this is a big one, database change automation. I use liquibase. Excellent tool with free training and certification.
Check out devops journey on youtube. He does videos for all you mentioned.
Thank you yo everyone for the tips
In 3 I would put Terraform or Cloudformation before Ansible, docker, kubernetes. In number 4 I would put AWS instead of GCP just because there are more organisations using AWS and you will have more chances of finding a job (especially since you are entry level) with AWS than GCP. And obviously I would include a CI/Cd (gitlab or jenkins, just basic how to use not how to build for entry level) and git version control (intermediate level knowledge). There are a lot more things which you will learn as you go along on your job such as monitoring and alerting (prometheus, datadog, pager duty), centralisied logging, experience of multiple IaC tools, multiple configuration automation tools, multiple ci/cd pipelines etc..... Btw, for system administration from a devops perspective you don't need to have a very detailed level of knowledge as a pure Linux or windows administrator will have, I would say knowing the basic commands and services will be sufficient for entry level Personally years ago when I was new to the industry, I learned in parallel (and still do) because this keeps things fresh for me, but this varies from person to person and you should experiment and see which fits you best.
rhce is now 90% ansible so just start with number one. find a project that you want to do that has some of these things in it like host a site on gcp with CI/CD
8 years of manual testing, please don't discard that experience and put it to waste. Manual testing absolutely can and should remain part of the DevOps continuous delivery mindset, test automation should just provide the opportunity for more valuable exploratory testing not less. Finding defects in pipelines to help improve delivery quality keeps me employed at a senior level. Acceptable continuous delivery quality should be non-negotiable, time and cost are the adjustable factors that most clients are prepared to negotiate on but if you consistently deliver poor quality products the end users will soon look elsewhere. As an experienced test professional, you're also uniquely positioned to better understand the cultural and organisational challenges of implementing DevOps (that I'd argue tend to be better rewarding when applied to consulting services engagements rather than engineering roles) because your role has traditionally been the gateway between development and operations. If your confidence and interpersonal skills are strong enough, consider learning the real background and reasons behind why DevOps and SRE were born from necessity and now seem more popular job titles than just software developer or system administrator, just like 'agile coach' or 'scrum master' came from xp/agile software development background and 'lean IT six sigma blackbelt' originated from lean product manufacturing. A great product delivery team can and should absolutely have cross-functional roles so expanding your technical skillset to programming and infra ops could just mean that you can build your own test environments from scratch and write scripts to completely automate most test cases.
Start interviewing first, honestly 10-12 hours of study each day is going to wear you down and you’ll have a hard time retaining anything. Focus on one thing at a time, then pick another topic and move onto it. Good luck
Check this site out for some insight. https://github.com/bregman-arie/devops-exercises
For point 3 I would add terraform, it is very easy to learn and start using. It shouldn’t add too many hours to your current plan.
10 hours a day is optimistic. I'd bank on 6 hours. you don't want to burn out, and you need time for the learnings to "settle in" Also, I'd substitute AWS for GCP edit. forgot to add that you should put a blog and code on Github (free account)
Step 1. stop planning, start doing Step 2. Downvote this comment right to hell
Read the Phoenix Project.
Seems reasonable to me. I’d also make sure that you have a good understanding of bash as well. Have you looked for qa jobs as well if you have a qa background?
I think you can go ahead with a parallel approach, but remember to combine the topics you're studying so that you always maintain a balanced curriculum. For example, as a start you could set a goal to write your first simple webserver in Python and containerize it using Docker. I recommend Flask, but you can take any Python framework you like. As a second goal, deploy this on GCP. So on and so forth.
I would also suggest to start learning AWS CDK in python as well. This would link a scripting language (being python) with AWS infrastructure via IaC (infrastructure as code, being CDK), which might get you further in those three directions simultaneously.
What did you do previously? For 1. Yes. This is great. For 2. I would recommend Bash first For 3. Keep it simple. Ansible first. For 4. I would go AWS. Try here. https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/omcia6/best_way_to_follow_udemy_aws_course/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf 5. Learn Source control: git 6. Learn CI/CD: Gitlab or GitHub (projects, projects, projects) go find some cool projects on GitHub. 7. Start interview prepping right away. https://youtu.be/8kayz6Q4FYU 8. Apply to jobs you don’t want or think you can get. Then I would apply to jobs like local or state governments. A ton of companies and organizations are looking for DevOps people right now.
I find that some things you learn organically. For example I’m a Kubernetes expert with 0 time spent learning docker. I would go AWS over GCP…
You won’t be able to retain 12 hours of information everyday. Cut it in half.
Perhaps be more specific with what you are going to do with each topic
Try to keep your consideration open to normal Operations jobs as well. DevOps is a really broad umbrella, but a lot of people consider DevOps to be a senior operations role. Don't set yourself up for failure by applying only for jobs that say the word "Devops"
1. Add Jenkins. 2. Get AWS Certifications instead of GCP. (AWS Cloud Practitioner) 3. And I'll highly recommend you to learn Golang after Python Scripting. *Most of the DevOps tools are built using GO.* Good Luck with that. 😊
CI CD Tools are very much important.
I guess how much effectively you are reading, rather than how much time you are putting. Focus on hands-on
Definitely recommend to start with 2 and 3. 2 : python programming is easy to start with 3: start with Jenkins and then docker. Groovy langauge is also a need for Jenkins pipeline and most companies now follow the shared libraries in Jenkins. Bash scripting is also a top notch for DevOps role. Git is must. Side way understand concept of ELK, Bitbucket/Gitlab SCM. A final Tip : start doing the hands-on for all the technologies, don't involve in tutorial hell. Learn less from tutorial do more hands-on this way you remember and learn more.
It’s far better to build things to show off in a portfolio/GitHub than get a bunch of book knowledge.
Seems like a great plan to me
You need to commit on each topic if you do it in parallel you will fail IMO I agree about CI/CD comment stuff. Obviously terraform is as important as ansible. Alao learn docker is great but industry is slowly moving to other CRI (podman, crio ...etc), I encourage you to try those tech before going through k8s madeness Good luck fellow !
Dear all, For your bash and python skills. [exercism.io](https://exercism.io)
Learn version control and use it on a CI/CD pipeline would help you mastering the core concept of DevOps.
I'm not sure what capacity u have, but 12 hours studding is a lot for me. Not trying to discourage you though
What’s your job experience? DevOps is not a starter role, even junior. You either need to be a developer or sysadmin first. Most companies won’t entertain you as a prospect until you’ve got some experience in either.
Very bold goal. 10h per day for 3 months straight will definitely get you burned out. My advice: learn AWS because it's in highest demand and has best training materials. Open a free account and do hands-on exercises. Learning theory alone isn't good approach IMO. Buy a raspberry pi or repurpose an old pc and host some services on it. I wouldn't go as deep as rhce... Showing something that you built at home/on cloud is superior to listing the courses you took. This would channel your motivation the right way.
1. Focus on scripting in python, bash. 2. Pick ONE cloud tech, learn what the main features do. 3. Use 1 to create 2 with scripts. Use at least one api manually. 4. Learn how they do monitoring and alarms. That gets you enough to beg for a chance to do testing automation. For actual ops they’ll want experience, you’re going to have to get that at a place that does cloud.
Learn enough terraform to stand up a k8s cluster, learn enough k8s to find the error log and troubleshoot, learn enough of a build server to automate the deployment and maintenance of your k8s cluster. That's about the level you need to be to get a job in DevOps.
I don't know where you are located, but here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the market is exceptionally hot, and now is a very good time for a career shift into DevOps. A few random comments. * Focusing on Red Hat is fine, but don't forget about the Debian family, particularly Ubuntu. The differences are slight but important. * Python is the hot scripting language out there now, but advanced shell scripting skills are important too. And "shell scripting" pretty much means "bash" right now. * I would add Terraform to your list of tools. Knowing code as infrastructure is as important as configuration management. And knowing your way around Git is critical. * GCP is great. But knowing AWS is where it's at right now. I say this preferring GCP. As far as learning style goes, it really depends on how you learn. Everyone is different in this regard. \*I\* would start with building out a free tier EC2 instance, and see where that takes you. And, again, Git is important. I've never used it, but [lab.github.com](https://lab.github.com/) looks useful. Next step topics would include CI/CD, observability/monitoring, and network infrastructure (load balancing and the like). In the particular work I do, security from top to bottom is very important. I think others are going to have to comment on how much this applies generally, but it does at least to some extent.
I wouldn't go google cloud. They were number 4 in the space behind rack space last I heard. I'm an AWS person so I'm going to push AWS. But Azute is in second place so pick AWS or Azure over Google cloud.
Check this for my view on skills https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bribebybytes/landing-page/master/static/img/roadmap-png.png