
Ops School Curriculum (2012) - LinuxBender
http://www.opsschool.org/
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avleenvig
Hi everyone! I really appreciate the feedback here.

It's true, the project is 5+ years old. The industry was very different back
then, we were barely starting to think about containers at scale. The cloud
was a thing for sure, but the main contributors were mostly working in places
with physical infrastructure.

Over the years we've discussed how we can reboot the project. There is always
interest and desire, but time is hard to find :) The project will stay up as
it is because we still feel there is value in learning the basics.

Over time the understanding of what is "basics" is evolving. This year I'm
chairing the SREcon conference in Singapore. The program has a "Core
Principles" track which talks about things like deep dives on linux memory
management, database indices, how BGP works, etc. There is a lot of desire to
still have these super deep dives into underlying technology. I hope we can
find a way to turn this into a stronger curriculum with labs and teaching
exercises one day :)

\- One of the original OpsSchool founders

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znpy
Hey, thank you!

As someone who has been practicing a lot in an 'old school' environment (many
of our customers still run our software the old way) I honestly think this
still is a very good curriculum.

Actually I think many of the things listed, people underlook at them. I've
seen with my eyes digging very deep on "cloud" and "devops" stuff fail
completely (and spectacularly, I must admit) ad very basic things.

I'll be digging deeper into opschool.org, is there a way to have an offline
copy (besides running httrack) ?

~~~
znpy
replying to myself: [http://readthedocs.org/projects/ops-
school/downloads/htmlzip...](http://readthedocs.org/projects/ops-
school/downloads/htmlzip/latest/)

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eropple
(edit: looks like, as per a comment further down, a lot of this is five-ish
years old; the decisions made in its writing/presentation make a lot more
sense in that light. Leaving comment for posterity.)

So I get the overall goal here, but reading this, this feels like somebody's
trying to fight the last war.

 _> Since the early 90’s, operations engineers have been in high demand. As a
result, these positions often offer high salaries and long term job security._

...because most of the control surfaces offered minimal automation and there
were many fewer options for management. This isn't even a "well, AWS/GCP/Azure
will eat your lunch" thing, it's a "the robots can do most of this already"
thing. There are still roles for network engineers, large-scale datacenter
management, and that sort of thing--but this "curriculum" reads as
very...hands-on...when a holistic, automation-first approach is overwhelmingly
preferred in industry (outside of the trailing edge, where those high salaries
and that stability aren't nearly as common).

Again: not saying "use the cloud, datacenters don't matter." But I'm not sure
that this encompasses what "ops" typically means (as opposed to "IT", which is
itself becoming a largely automatable and automated function, or "devops",
which will get there sooner than later) and I'm very unsure that places that
will still be dealing with data centers in ten years, instead of outsourcing
it, will benefit much from juniors with this skillset instead of one built
around software definition and a pervasively automation-first mindset.

~~~
gowld
What happens in 20 years when all the professionals in the industry have no
understanding of what their robots do?

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eropple
Then they learn how the robots work? Because their brains work and because
they have the underlying plasticity of skillset to pick it up?

I'm a software developer first and foremost. When I've needed to deal with
hardware, I learned it. And it was _easier_ because the first question was
always "OK, now how do we make this something a human doesn't do?". It's a
band-pass filter for what actually matters to continued operations.

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stoic
Wow, this is really great! Soft Skills 201 could be a book unto itself, nice
to see this stuff being discussed.

In general, I think the soft skills sections should get a lot more promotion
(it's buried so far down the sidebar I had to scroll!). The technical stuff is
already well-documented elsewhere, but nobody ever told me how important being
politically savvy was in this niche until I had already blown both feet off
several times.

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argd678
This lacks the most critical part of ops in designing systems that are
repeatable and debugable, discrete build steps on a time line. You can’t
reason about any complex system without some core logic and this is most
absent in operations.

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leetrout
That is a very accurate, succinct comment. I’m going to steal this when
arguing for Terraform.

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incomplete
i just let the opsschool author know about this post. he'll be on here soon!
:)

~~~
avleenvig
Thanks incomplete :)

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saifulwebid
I laughed at how the "MS Windows fundamentals 101" is blank.

Because no operations engineer should use MS Windows? :see_no_evil:

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mverwijs
From 2012.

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nerdkid93
It's an OPS tutorial, but their SSL cert is invalid. :/ One of the authors
needs to update their settings in ReadTheDocs.

