
Ask HN: Switching Career from Full Stack to DevOps full time - haidrali
Hello<p>I am a full stack developer working with ruby, js, postgres, redis on application development mainly. I am looking into switching my career to DevOps. Currently I have involve into requirement analysis, UI&#x2F;UX, development, testing and production things but now thinking of exploring DevOps more &amp; more Any suggestion of prior such experience share would be highly thankful
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techjuice
You should only go into the DevOps world after you have also gained systems
engineering experience too which is the Ops part of DevOps. This would involve
the capability to setup from scratch a Linux, Unix and or Windows server which
would include securing and setting up the security, web, database, mail, and
networking services (IIS, Apache, NGINX, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle,
MariaDB, Exchange, Sharepoint, sendmail, postfix, etc.) in a secure manner
remotely using only SSH and or PowerShell depending on the environment you are
in.

You would also be expected to be able to setup disaster recovery COOP
(continuity of operations plan) and backup setups for the site along with
testing and executing them on a regular basis if the site requires it. You
should also have a very good understanding of virtualization technology
(VMWare, Xen, AWS, Google Cloud, Citrix, KVM) and orchestration technology
(Ansible, Chef, Puppet, VMWare Orchestrator, etc.) Basically you are also
expected to be at least an intermediate level systems engineer with experience
in systems automation that can also do secure software engineering.

It is not hard if you have been doing both for 5+ years, but will take some
time especially if you have never had a full-time job as a systems engineer
building and tearing down information systems from scratch for local private
and public internet facing systems, along with automating. If you have had
experience as a full time systems engineer I would say go ahead as it would
compliment your software engineering experience of web applications along with
the testing that you have done to make a pretty good DevOps Engineer.

~~~
haidrali
Thank you for reply, you comment really is really helpful, Yes I have been
setting production environment for doing production but never had full time
system engineering position. I have very good grasp over linux file system,
security(intermediate level),Inter process communication, VIM and utilities
like grep, HTOP, ps aux etc, . What do you think of linux academy
([https://linuxacademy.com/](https://linuxacademy.com/)) should I start taking
courses from here ?

Thanks

~~~
techjuice
The more you train for and learn the better, I would also recommend looking
into the Linux Foundation -
[https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification](https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification)
and the very well known Linux Certifications from Redhat -
[https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification](https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification)
since they are performance based and you cannot pass them without actually
being able to do the work.

If you want to add a few more in demand skill sets to the mix I would also
recommend getting at least a CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) and
possibly a CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional) certification so you
will also be very sufficient in understanding and configuring routers and
switches for LANs and WANs. These would help when determining how to scale
your website, if you ever end up managing a colocation setup or have to get
hands on with the hardware as there is normally not a separate network
engineer on site unless the customer has a very large budget to pay for both
system engineers and network engineers.

------
nillawafer
When researching this topic myself, I have found volumes of wonderful insight
in the Google Site Reliability Engineering book, available to read free online
at:
[https://landing.google.com/sre/book/index.html](https://landing.google.com/sre/book/index.html)

~~~
haidrali
Yes I have head of this book, can you draw what Site Reliability Engineer has
common with DevOps engineer ?

