DevOps Blog - Nicolas Paris

Is DevOps For You

DevOps

You are a Developer or an Ops, and you consider DevOps but you are not sure that you will like the job. Here is some consideration to make.

Requirements depends on team you will join. DevOps on a small company where you are on your own can be lonely, when devs can be about sharing knowledge, DevOps can be knowledge you don’t share. Devs don’t care how a Kubernetes cluster works. It will imply skills like search on your own, nobody will help you if you don’t find something.

Bigger teams are different, you be more managed by other on your journey into DevOps.

Yaml, yaml, yaml... You will need manipulate lots of them, just deal with it.

Dev sometime don’t like waste time with is environment, PHP library missing? they totally lost. NPM doesn’t build? worst. Dockerfile? don’t get it. They became frustrated, consider losing time, ask help to a lead dev. This kind of problem is usual. I'm good to deal with it, errors stacks are my friends. A Dockerfile for production with optimization will get lots of them.

Abstraction can be important if you came from development world this should not be a problem. Kubernetes, and deal with problems on a cluster can ask a level of abstraction.

In my day-to-day job, I have hands on production often, it can be stressful, things can break, even if you have environment test to make sure tricky stuff would not break production. If something breaks in production, they can ask you to fix it, quickly, your mistake can cost lots of money and make people, your superior, and his superior can be quickly become angry. It depends on structure of the society, small one lead quickly to be more responsible to have a working production.

Learning, if you do not like learning new tools you will not make it. Simple as that.

Dashboard, you make few of them, to be aware of problem faster, but if a red alert stress you, it can be difficult.

DevOps is closely bound to production, if it breaks at night for some reasons, you’re the one that needs to fix it, but it depends on jobs.

I hope I did not discourage you, just be aware that DevOps can be tricky sometime.