First thing to keep in mind — you won’t find the usual “DevOps is a mindset/methodology” or “DevOps is a set of practices” stuff here. This blog is about me, the problems I faced, and my own approaches and fixes. No fluff, just real talk.

👨‍💻 From Java Dreams to Prod Support Blues

As a tech guy living in the financial capital of the country, I was surrounded by fintech firms and financial institutions. After graduating with a Bachelor of Technology, I began my career as a Java developer in a fast-growing fintech company.

Back then, I didn’t know much about the work culture or how teams functioned. Just as I was settling into the Java development world, I was moved to the Production Support team — which, to be honest, hurt like 22% of my feels. “Aww man, Java developer would've been a better profile…” Hehe.

💡 Falling in Love with Deployments

But as time passed, working with deployments — transferring .class files, comparing inner code to the outer shell scripts that sent packages to servers worldwide — I started falling in love with infrastructure.

I realized I had a passion for servers, a knack for deployments, and an itch for understanding cluster management. I wanted to dive deeper into server architecture and Linux as an OS...

Only to find out:

LINUX IS NOT AN OPERATING SYSTEM — IT'S JUST A KERNEL!

Revelation after revelation, I found an entire ocean of knowledge waiting: system administration, VMs, bare metal beasts, and those crazy IBM machines.

🎓 The First Leap: Quitting to Learn

That’s when I made a risky decision — I quit my job to pursue advanced server studies with a focus on RHCSA certification.

I stumbled upon this amazing institution nearby: RST Forum. They took my basic knowledge and layered it with industry-level expertise. And that’s when a certified system admin was born out of a regular old normie developer.

But that was just the beginning.

☁️ Next Stop: AWS Solutions Architect

After mastering Linux servers on RHEL 9.0 with Ansible, I went on to become an AWS Solutions Architect, again through RST Forum.

I learned how all the AWS services integrated, how cost management worked, and how microservices communicated inside the cloud ecosystem.

💼 Landing a System Admin Role

I started sharing my journey on LinkedIn. Soon enough, I got recognition — and even landed a job as a System Administrator L2 for a vendor at a top-tier Indian bank.

That’s when daily work became a parameter passed through an API called Mumbai Local Train 😂

My day-to-day tasks included:

Deployments
Health checks
Backups & firewall reviews
Managing POM files and similar dependencies

But after a year of this monotonous grind, I felt it was time for the next move.

⚔️ Second Leap: Enter DevSecOps

That’s when I realized I needed to transition to DevSecOps. So, like any overly excited techie, I loaded my machine with:

Docker
Kubernetes
Jenkins
Argo
Flux
And every other tool I had ever heard of…

I started tampering with them one by one.

But soon, reality hit me:

This isn’t how DevOps works.
There’s no magical IaC config file that I can just paste into /mind/%APPDATA% to instantly become a DevOps engineer.

🎯 Full Reset: Quit Again & Go All In

That realization led me to take another leap of faith — I quit again to focus entirely on:

Learning the tools properly
Building real-world projects
Writing blogs
And committing myself fully to mastering the DevOps landscape

Ironically, the company offered me a 100% salary hike when I resigned, but I had already made up my mind. I was chasing growth, not comfort.

📚 What’s Next?

This blog series is my way of giving back. I’ll be sharing:

The learnings
The projects
The mistakes
And the exact approaches I took during this journey

🧑‍🏫 Coming Up Next…

In the next article, I’ll introduce you to the mentors and the institution where I’ve been learning and evolving over the past two years.

Thanks for reading — stay tuned!
And if you’ve ever made a risky move in your tech journey, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below 🙌

How Did I End Up On The DevOps Road ?