I work in a small team that deploys some internal products. No big user pool or database for me! We build small web apps that automate inner processes, and some scripts and jobs. Most of it runs on k8s, the apps and the jobs. We mostly run everyting on Azure. And everyting is managed by code, obviously, so we've build GitHub actions pipeline that live with the code to deploy our infra via bicep and the code via a test-build-deploy-promote pipeline, started on push.

But I've seen some platforms that propose full CI/CD as a services, and it feels like managing the pipeline yourself these days is a bad thing. To me, deploying a solution, especially in the containerization era, is simple; Run the tests, build the image, deploy the workload. Add some customization related to the app if needed (specific parameters, logging or testing jobs, etc). But is managing this code yourself a bad practice? I have to say, it does make for a lot of duplicate code in a lot of repos. The pipelines are very similar.

Should we always aim to use a standardized CI/CD platform? What tools do you use for CI/CD? How different do you handle it from a small project to a more important service?

For those who are actively employed in DevOps roles in the USA, how are you finding the current state of DevOps employment in the USA?

Do you feel your jobs are stable?

Do you believe DevOps employment in the USA is steady, growing or shrinking?

Do you believe that AI is eliminating hiring of entry/junior DevOps engineers?

I ask because I am currently out of the software technology work force and pondering trying to re-enter in a DevOps role.

Hello! As the title says, I'm a QA engineer and I'm trying to transition to a new position. Right now, I don't know whether to pick Data Engineering or DevOps. Regarding my skills, in my free time I'm learning Linux, Python (along with some MySQL), CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, and currently playing around with Azure. I'm asking because both seem interesting, but I don't know which one to choose to learn further.

Edit: also learnt some openshift and helm chart, because it was requested at my job

Every time this comes up the answer is "run it in a sandbox." Which, sure. But the stuff I actually want an agent for lives in staging and prod. Sandboxing it kind of just means it can't do the thing I wanted it to do in the first place.

So right now my entire safety net is me reading the command before I hit approve, and I'm not going to pretend I'm still reading those properly by the tenth one.

Is anyone running something that's actually built for this? As in it sees a dangerous command and kills it on its own, instead of me being the last line of defense. Or is everyone just living with it, because from the outside that's kind of what it looks like.

Been in IT for about 2 years. Have Compia Trifecta, CCNA, jamf pro. After the CCNA been stuck not knowing what to do. Been studying the MD-102 Endpoint cert for about a month but it’s so boring and I don’t think I want to become an endpoint/Intune admin. Prob will drop it.

My thought process is to create a very basic full stack web app (don’t know any frontend and only had a month studying python) -> then host it on my proxmox using terraform and docker as a learning tool for devops

Is this fine? Any suggestion? Creating the web app will take a while 1000%, and devops don’t need frontend knowledge, but there’s an itch in my brain to learn it though.

This is officially my first post on a reddit sub, i tend to just be reading a lot from here, but getting to the issue, recently i got a new role as DevOps Engineer mid level, chill job, making a new architecture to migrate one heavy ETL app, just one month in, not much meetings, no manager pursuing me every day, a really chill job (OBS: 8yoe on IT ~2-3yoe in Sysadmin/DevOps)

My biggest worry is on how i work, months from now i was an Tech Lead on a AI first company, so i got pretty used to use AI for a lot (ngl it facilitates it, really). Today i use it to make Pipelines templates, bicep templates and even troubleshoot some stuff regarding infrastructure.

The problem is, im using it too much and i dont know if this is a standard nowadays (i mean, it accelerate things BY A LOT if you know how to properly use it) or if im just being a dumbass that is outsourcing my own work just to not touch code.

How is it going for you guys? Maybe i should stop a bit and do something 100% by hand, intentionally delay stuff so i can get work on my own... Really confuse if this is acting correctly and i'm just with impostor syndrome (again).

If you have a small managed K8s cluster with a single node pool and you would like to change the SKU of the VMs in that node pool, make sure to double check how your Terraform provider handles this change

Maybe on AWS or Azure or whatever, this is a graceful operation where the new nodes are provisioned first and the old ones are drained before being deleted

On OVH however it will destroy the existing nodepool first then provision the new one, and during this process your cluster will have zero nodes and whatever was running on it will be down

Thankfully this wasn't a production cluster. At the end of the day I'm just a dev who takes care of devops because nobody else will. In hindsight I feel like I should have seen this coming, but I guess most things work automagically nowadays and it can be a surprise when something does not

here is the context: Mid size (1000 users) company that has been trying to do in-house software dev (outsourced to south east Asia) with poor results.

Company IT side is fairly mature, heavily virtualized, hybrid on prem/cloud, but a bit weak on the Azure side. Existing sysadmins are pretty solid.

The dev is, well a shitshow. We are presented with projects with no infrastructure requirements, the devs dont really seem to know what they need. Currently they are doing everything in Blazor after we begged them to move to cloud. Last few attempts to develop mobile apps has been an abysmal failure. Im dumbfounded by what I see (and I've never coded). Coding is all shoved into a single .dll, no comments, devs dont seem to know that we need to use HTTPS, dont understand key vaults (we caught them passing passwords in clear text). we had to fight with them to implement change control, and they dont seem to understand our efforts to move ahead with pipelining.

My question for you is, do I need a devops admin? Can a more senior devops admin also be involved in reviewing code? infrastructure planning?

not sure how to move forward

I'm curious if other DevOps/platform/SRE teams are running into the same thing my team is.

We're a fairly large environment, mostly EKS, and essentially 100% IaC/Terraform. We also support multiple companies/business units, so while I'd argue our infrastructure is fairly well organized, there's inherently a lot of it and a lot of architecture and context to understand.

Over the last year, our devs have sped up dramatically with AI. The company has leaned heavily into AI-assisted development, reduced developer headcount, and is now pushing toward developers being more "full stack with AI," including having them contribute more of their own infrastructure changes.

In theory, I'm completely in favor of that. I've always wanted developers to be able to own more of the infrastructure surrounding their applications.

In practice, though, it has been kind of a disaster.

We're getting flooded with infrastructure PRs largely written by Claude/other AI tools from developers who don't really understand the infrastructure they're modifying. The Terraform might look plausible, but once you understand the larger system there are frequently significant problems with it.

So instead of reducing the workload on DevOps, it feels like AI has massively increased it.

A huge percentage of our time is now spent reviewing AI-generated Terraform, finding problems, explaining why something won't work, explaining how AWS/EKS/networking/IAM/CI/CD/etc. fit together in our environment, and then going through another iteration of an AI-generated PR.

There's an interesting asymmetry I've noticed too. Our DevOps team is mostly made up of former software developers who moved toward infrastructure, automation, and pipelines. Most of us can jump into application code and be productive pretty quickly, especially with AI helping us. Like,...I feel like (and have some evidence to support) that our small DevOps team could largely take over all of the dev's tasks, but they are falling on their faces trying to deal with ours.

AI seems extremely good at helping someone who understands software write more software. It seems much less capable of allowing someone without infrastructure experience to suddenly understand a large production environment.

The complaint we're increasingly hearing is basically: "We can't successfully do full-stack development with AI because the infrastructure is too complicated."

And maybe they're right, but before AI, I would have said that this company is the most organized and best architected I've ever been at. I mean....100% IaC has never been something I've experienced, and it's very rare that we hit a use case brought up by one of the several companies where we don't already have a set of generalized modules that can't support it.

Our environment is complex, but a lot of that complexity isn't accidental. We have a large organization, multiple companies we deploy for, Kubernetes, networking, security requirements, IAM, CI/CD, observability, etc. You can't abstract away the fact that these things exist. And we're already 100% Terraform/IaC, which I would have thought would make this considerably easier for AI to reason about than an environment full of manually configured infrastructure.

The strangest part is the staffing effect.

AI allowed the organization to reduce software engineering headcount because individual developers became more productive. But now those remaining developers can generate changes so quickly that our DevOps team is completely overwhelmed trying to support and review them.

It genuinely feels like we could double the size of the DevOps team right now and still have plenty of work. We are working on an AI assistant that can help the devs deploy to our environment more effectively, but we're having a hard time finding time to work on it because we're constantly helping the devs.

I'm starting to wonder whether this is going to be a broader consequence of AI-assisted development: AI increases the rate at which software can be produced much faster than it increases the rate at which infrastructure/platform teams can safely absorb changes.

For those of you working in DevOps/platform/SRE at companies heavily adopting AI:

Are you seeing this too?

And if you are, how are you handling it?

Have you increased platform/DevOps staffing? Built better abstractions or internal developer platforms? Given developers more direct infrastructure ownership? Put stricter boundaries around what application teams can modify? Found ways of giving AI enough context about your infrastructure that it actually produces good changes?

Or has AI actually reduced your infrastructure workload, and we're doing something wrong?

I genuinely think DevOps or platform engineering is the area of software I enjoy the most.

I like CI/CD, Terraform, cloud infrastructure, debugging weird deployment problems, trying to understand why systems fail, automating repetitive things, and generally having ownership instead of just implementing another CRUD endpoint.

I’m currently a working student in an SRE/platform team in a big company in Germany. I’ve already worked on things like services from Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Cloud Run, deployment alerts, state migrations and fixing random infrastructure problems that come up along the way.

And the funny thing is that the more I learn, the more I like it.

But looking for a junior position is becoming pretty frustrating:

A lot of “Junior DevOps” jobs seem to expect Kubernetes production experience, several cloud providers, Terraform, Ansible, networking, Linux, CI/CD, monitoring, security and somehow 2–3 years of professional experience with all of them.

Then there are actual entry level positions, but many of them seem to basically be IT support with “cloud” or “DevOps” in the title.

I know I still have a huge amount to learn. I don’t expect someone to give me a production Kubernetes cluster on day one and say good luck. I actually want to be around experienced engineers, get challenged, make mistakes and slowly become someone who can be trusted with serious systems.

My goal isn’t to job hop every six months either. I would genuinely like to find a team where I can stay for several years and become really good at this.

But sometimes I wonder how exactly companies expect junior DevOps engineers to become experienced DevOps engineers if almost everyone wants the experience before giving you the opportunity to get it.

For people who are already working in DevOps/SRE/platform engineering: how did you actually get your first proper role?

Did you already know most of the stack, or did somebody simply take a chance on you and let you learn?

Edit: I worded the sysadmin part badly. I don’t think sysadmin work is beneath me at all. I just want to move toward automation, infrastructure and software rather than mostly ticket-based support.

Edit 2: I respect that some of you suggest starting in help desk or sysadmin. But my long term goal is to move into an SRE role, ideally something closer to how Google approaches SRE. I read the SRE book and really liked the idea of treating operations as a software engineering problem, with automation, reliability, monitoring and reducing repetitive manual work. That is the direction I want to build toward.

were on 50+ microservices on gcp, still doing our own deploy tooling. keep hearing gitops is the way and honestly cant tell if thats real or just the current hype cycle.

not looking for a sales pitch, more curious what broke for you after the demo phase. drift detection, secrets, rollback under load, whatever. did it actually reduce incidents or just move the pain somewhere else

what would you tell yourself before adopting it

Hey everyone,
Is anyone here currently working in AWS Data Center Operations (DCO) in the Frankfurt region (or Germany) or familiar with their technical screening process?

I recently completed a 60-minute technical phone screen with an engineer for an AWS DCO / IT Support role in Germany. During the technical portion, I answered all hardware, networking, and cabling troubleshooting questions without getting stuck. At the end, the interviewer explicitly told me: "The technical part was pretty good, that's what I can tell you."

For the behavioral part, I answered four questions using the STAR method. In the closing feedback, the interviewer noted that I sounded a bit nervous and strictly said the literal STAR words out loud ("The situation was...", "My task was...", "The action was...", "The result was..."), though he mentioned that if my recruiter instructed me to use that exact structure, it doesn't matter.

For anyone who has been through this specific Frankfurt/EMEA pipeline or interviews for AWS DCO: does sounding nervous or explicitly vocalizing STAR labels carry a negative impact if the technical answers and core story data points were solid? What are the realistic odds of moving forward to the onsite loop from here?

Would really appreciate any insights from anyone with AWS DCO experience in Frankfurt or Germany. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’ve just started learning DevOps from scratch and thought it might be fun to learn together with others here. If anyone is also starting out, we can share resources, discuss concepts, and keep each other updated on our progress.

I feel it’s always more motivating when a few people are learning the same thing together. Having a small group with the same goal makes the process more encouraging and enjoyable.

If you’re interested, feel free to comment...

Hey r/devops, welcome to our weekly self-promotion thread!

Feel free to use this thread to promote any projects, ideas, or any repos you're wanting to share. Please keep in mind that we ask you to stay friendly, civil, and adhere to the subreddit rules!

I've heard the "engineering doesn't care about cost" problem come up quite a bit, but I'm starting to wonder if that's actually the right diagnosis.

If an engineer can see latency, errors, CPU, memory and availability for their service, but has no idea whether that service costs $500 or $50,000 a month, can we really expect cost to factor into their decisions?

What have teams done to give engineers enough cost visibility to make better decisions without turning every engineer into a FinOps specialist?

I'm currently working in DevOps/SRE and I'm trying to better understand the gap between my current experience and what is expected from DevOps/SRE engineers in other countries.

My long-term goal is to work internationally, so I'm trying to be realistic about where I stand and what I need to improve before making that move.

I'd really like to connect with DevOps/SRE engineers who are currently working in countries outside their home country, especially people who have gone through a similar transition.

I'm interested in learning about things such as:

• What technical skills are most important for international DevOps/SRE roles?
• Which areas did you personally have to improve when moving to another country?
• How important are Kubernetes, AWS/Azure/GCP, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, security, and scripting in your current role?
• Are there any skills that people often overlook when preparing for these roles?
• What level of system design, troubleshooting, Linux, networking, and cloud knowledge is expected?
• How important are communication and teamwork skills compared with technical skills?
• What would you focus on if you were preparing for an international DevOps/SRE role from scratch today?

I'm not looking for job offers or referrals. I'm mainly trying to identify my knowledge gaps, learn from people with real experience, and build a better learning path.

If you're working abroad as a DevOps/SRE engineer and are open to sharing your experience, I'd really appreciate a chat. Even a short 15–20 minute conversation would be very helpful.

Happy to connect with others who are on a similar path too. We can exchange what we're learning and help each other improve.

Thanks!

I am a contributor to both terraform-provider-aws and Ansible Core repos, as well as Ansible Community AWS repo. I am on the lookout for additional projects to contribute to, ideally ones that have plenty of issues and where reviews are done quickly. It should also be quick and easy to compile from source. Looking for Golang or Python projects for code base programming language. Any ideas here?

I’ve been reflecting on my current stack and daily routine lately. While I appreciate the stability of my current role, the day-to-day maintenance and incremental improvements mean I'm not always exposed to new paradigms or forced out of my comfort zone.

The landscape moves incredibly fast right now, between the shift toward Platform Engineering, AI-assisted workflows, and new CNCF projects dropping every week, I want to make sure I don't stagnate.

I'd love to hear how you all are keeping your edge and pushing yourselves. Specifically:

• What’s your go-to method for upskilling? (Homelabs, contributing to open source, chasing certs, or just carving out dedicated learning time at work?)
• How do you manufacture new challenges when your day job gets a bit too comfortable or repetitive?
• What is the most interesting tool, pattern, or concept you are digging into right now?

Looking forward to hearing what everyone is working on!