DevOps Blog - Nicolas Paris

What I've done to improve my DevOps skills

DevOpsLearning

I'm a developper who's trying to improve his DevOps skills. The DevOps field seems like a journey, based on learning and experiments. My job is more about code, but I can experiments the DevOps side.

Linux / Servers

First, I have a sollid Linux background. If you don't have some knowledge on Linux, start here before everything. I was a member of a Linux User Group in my town with responsabilities on that group.

Important, you need to know your way around with a Linux terminal, know your command lines without thinking of it, like instinct. You should consider some NCurses like htop, ncdu and others.

ELK Stack

The idea is to centralize information about your servers, it very useful for example to have an idea of 500's errors on an nginx reverse proxy. Splunk and others solution can be very expensive, this one in open-source. Lots of standardize services available like nginx, apache, system and others. It could agregate custom logs with some pipline, but it needs to get your hands durty.

Google Cloud Platform Certification

On a previous post, I talk about the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Certification that I took few months ago. It's a great experience, it opens lots of possibilities and ideas on deployments.

Docker

Docker is everywhere, used in production wildly. Have some notions about it is a must. I considere to take the Docker Certification Associate soon. We can debate if certification ore useful or not, but it's help to keep focus on learning and go deeper on the subject rather than just keep the day to day work with it. I'm not sure if it will be useful to find a job or not. I guess it cant hurt.

Orcherstation is a hot topic, with Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, get some knowledge on it could be useful.

Other topics

Other stuffs like Jenkins, that it was already setup in my entreprise, but that I haven't looked deeply. Git, git flow, gitlab of course, even if git is more a developper tool, the git integration has a DevOps side to considere.

Blog

Well, I think to write some post helps me to fix ideas and go deeper in some subject, and keep good trace of learning. Help to get to the end of a simple idea. like testing the Google Cloud Run or the Firestore

Conclusion

The idea of this, it's that DevOps can be very interesting to learn, just start somewhere.

I'll be glade to know about your choices on technologies you learned to improve your devops skills and to leverage up that knowledge base that a DevOps needs.

UPDATE: Docker swarm and Google Cloud Platform knowledge allow me to go deeper with a real on production setup, explain in the Docker Swarm, Traefik, HAProxy on Google Cloud Platform in real life