DevOps Path

I can go through my work journey and my reading/learning journey 

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# Overview
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I've always worked in small team with absurd ambitions and the only way to cope is to lean into automation.

I think its helped that I have a very concientious dispositition for consistently producing high quality work
I can take pride in and a low tolerance for toil (https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/) and absolutely
no regard for 'status quo'. The best way to achieve consistent, quality results is through automation IMO.

Generally speaking I still consider myself a software engineer at heart and approach all DevOps/Infrastructure engineering from the perspective of building the platform I would want to work on as a developer
which has served me extremely well.

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# Work/Education
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First job was working IT service desk at CDHB but I quickly got bored of that and started automating a bunch of stuff then I got to go work with a BA doing more automations and making responsive webforms for datacollection from clinicians.

Next job was as a support engineer for an Atlassian Solution partner in Wellington providing managed services of Jira / Confluence services for a bunch of Govt Agencies and writing a bunch of automations for upgrading or
integrating. Mostly just upskilling in Linux System Adminstration and Scripting with Python and Groovy.

Next job was as Junior python developer for Catalyst Cloud (https://catalystcloud.nz/) building and deploying a multi-region OpenStack public cloud and a couple of private clouds. I automated the quality assurance testing of our Windows Server AMIs provided to us by a 3rd party. We were having a lot of quality issues with AMIS they were giving us and it was costing us to much to continually retest them
every time there was an issue.

Then a big part of what I ended up doing there was dockerizing and then upgrading the OpenStack services so I learned docker, ansible and puppet in depth (but I wouldn't recommend investing time learning puppet or ansible now though unless you already have a usecase for them).

A huge help was we got $500/month in cloud credit as an employee benefit so I spent a lot of my free time taking advantage of that and building stuff in the cloud. Was great for learning cloud fundamentals and the
key value propisition of elasitic, on demand api driven cloud. Did a lot of work with the heat orchestration service which was the Openstack Equivalent of AWS Cloudformation and also learned a bit about terraform which I rate.

By the way I think you still get $300 credit free fro a year when you sign up with Catalyst Cloud

You also get similar credit when you sign up with the big 4 and AWS (and probably others) have a very generous free tier of most things so you can learn and it won't cost you much.
https://aws.amazon.com/free/?all-free-tier.sort-by=item.additionalFields.SortRank&all-free-tier.sort-order=asc&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Types=*all&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Categories=*all

Even if its not free, if you use terraform or cloudformation to spin resources up then you can spin them down again and be sure everything is cleaned up and not going to cost you.

The other thing I recommend is to set up a budgets alerts to let you know if something is costing you a lot of money.

Current job is DevOps/Cloud Engineer for payments. I took that job for a few reasons but one of which was to upskill with one of the 'big 4' cloud platforms. So I actually didn't know much AWS when I started but
I was solely responsible for building and securing our payments environments in AWS. We use terraform which I rate. Again, as part of a very small team with a huge system to take care of I agressively lean into automation.


I've also done a bunch of AWS certs via this guyd coursed. https://www.udemy.com/user/stephane-maarek/
Udemy coursed are pretty much always on sale for 80% - 90% off. I've never paid more than $18 USD for a course and you get a lot for that money. Don't pay full price its the suckers price often if you put it in your wishlist/cart and leave it overnight
they'll offer you a crazy discount to finish checking out.

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# Reading / Learning more or less in priority order.
#======================

I did a lot of reading (for me at least, im not a big reader). They also translate pretty well to Audio book if thats more your thing as it is for me.

I think my journey started early in my career reading
https://itrevolution.com/product/the-unicorn-project/

The unicorn project also includes the first couple of chapters of The DevOps handbook (https://www.amazon.com.au/DevOPS-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002)
as an appendix.

All of this material is summarised by this aricle but you should read those sources in full as no summarisation really covers it properly.
https://itrevolution.com/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/

The next absolute must read "Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling HighPreforming Technology Organizations". It goes through all the industry research.
(https://www.amazon.com.au/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339)

Which you can download (illegitimately) for free here but the paperback or audiobook are solidly worth the investment.
https://github.com/LuckyDudeThakur/EBooks/blob/master/Accelerate%20-%20Building%20and%20Scaling%20High%20Performing%20Technology%20Organisations%20-%20Nicole%20Fergrson.pdf


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# Other recommended reading, more or less in priority order
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Other things I read/watched

I started learning a bit about SRE which is like Google's specific framework/implementation of devops principles.

The book is available for free. Not one to read cover to cover but flick through chapters of interest especially eliminating-toil/
https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/

Google also have a bunch of videos about SRE and DevOps which are worth watching
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTEL8Ff1Zvk&list=PLIivdWyY5sqJrKl7D2u-gmis8h9K66qoj

Then I went on a bit of a binge learning about observability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C5eErvSvR4
Observability: Superpowers for Developers - Christine Yen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0tH9DnKUg
Observability and the Glorious Future - Charity Majors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOdtgHu_KeA
Observability for emerging infra - Charity Majors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOdtgHu_KeA
Engineering Large Systems When You're Not Google Or Facebook - Charity Majors

The Unicorn Project (well gave up reading and finished it via Audible). Its also a good read and more developer oriented
https://itrevolution.com/product/the-unicorn-project/
Its summarised by this article.
https://itrevolution.com/articles/five-ideals-of-devops/

Finally I was actually suprised how much value there was in reading this book from 1984. The unicorn project is basically just this book but rewritten for modern times and applied to IT organisations
https://www.amazon.com.au/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951