How Did I End Up On The DevOps Road ?

First thing to keep in mind that you wont find the regular old “devops is not a position its a mindset/ methodology”,“Devops is basically a set of practices” blah blah blah, rather this blog is about me and the problems i faced and encountered and what were my fixes and approaches to those problems.

As A Tech Dude Living in the financial capital of the country, my city has a ton of financial institutions, After Graduating as A Bachelor Of Technology From there I embarked as a java developer in a Fast growing fintech firm where I didn’t know much about tech related work culture and teams involving the same, As I was Initially in the Java Development Field I was Later moved on to the production support team which hurt like 22 percent of my feels “ Aww man java developer would’ve been a better profile” Hehe.

But as time went by, working with the deployment of the class files and comparing the inner code to the outer commands that take the built package to its destination server and it gets distributed throughout the world, I realized my passion for servers and a knack for deployments and cluster management, I wanted to dive deep into the servers architecture and Linux as an operating system, only to find out that LINUX IS NOT AN OPERATING SYSTEM, ITS JUST A KERNEL ! Revelations after revelations later i found out that there’s more than an ocean of knowledge rested within the depths of server administration, virtual machines, Bare Metal Behemoths and Crazy IBM machines.

life took a turn when i decided to take a risky step by quitting my job in order to study in depth about the servers on an advanced level with the help of RHCSA certification, and that’s when I stumbled across this amazing institution in my vicinity that’s called RST Forum, They took my existing knowledge and pasted their industry level expertise & world class skills and hence a certified system admin was born out of a regular old normie developer, and yet that was just the starting.

After mastering the Linux servers on RHEL 9.0 with Ansible, i decided to become an AWS Solutions Architect as well from the same institution, all the services provided by AWS and their integrations with the organizations, how cost management worked and how all the services communicated with each other.

Posts after posts on LinkedIn, I Already got the Recognition I needed, and already got a job offer to be a System administrator L2 and represent a vendor at a Top Tier Bank of India, and so work became a parameter which was passed everyday through an API called Mumbai Local Train, and the work i did everyday was the same old deployment and health checks, backups and firewall checks, maintaining all the POM files or similar type of files which contained app/tool level dependencies, anyway after working there for another year i realized that I need to move forward with this monotonous work and add some skills.

That’s when it clicked that i need to move to the DevSecOps Field and i started installing all the tools on my machine, Loaded with Docker and Kubernetes and Jenkins And Argo and flux and whatever i ever heard in my life was already on my system ,and started tampering with one by one and so did it occur to me that this is not the way to migrate to devops field, there might be some IAAC provisioning config file somewhere out there which I would further paste in my /mind/%APPDATA% and i would know everything related to the devops.

But I did find out that its not how the world works and this lead to the second courageous step I took In the way of devops transition that was to again quit my job and work on myself to build projects write blogs and to learn and try to master devops tools one by one with full focus and commitment, as I resigned from my position the company game me an offer of a 100% salary increase but by then i was fully convinced and did make up my mind to take the leap.

I decided to start this series where I would talk about the learnings , teachings , references and the projects that I made over the course of time, I would also be talking about the hardships that I faced during the whole journey and what approach did I take to get rid of those problems.

Stay Tuned for the next article where I would talk about my mentors and my institute where I have been learning all the skills from the last 2 years