First of, congratulations!

Few words before moving on:

  1. There is no such thing as DevOps Engineer, DevOps is a philosophy, a way of working.
  2. Your DevOps role will depend on your organization structure and maturity. Some organizations use DevOps, SRE and Platform engineering interchangeably, don’t worry. Focus on the goal.
  3. You will work in a team, empathy is mandatory.

A lot of people ask, do I really need to know ___ALL OF THAT___ to work as a DevOps Engineer?

Short answer is: no, most probably someone in your team or organization already knows how to do stuff, leverage them!! ask questions!!

Long answer is: yes, this role tends to be more complex than it should and I think a big part is communication and how people organize within a team. See Conway’s law for example.

Of course, the wide range of tools and stacks makes it complex but nothing like a good ol’ draw.io to help you visualize what’s happening.

Your goal

Help your team in identifying problems, scoping them and making them disappear. Rinse and repeat.

Know your tooling

Once you start working as DevOps “engineer”, specially if you come from a sysadmin or development background, you will start noticing a lot of patterns in the tooling and stacks, identify them as quickly as possible and create mental maps of why they are useful.

Then learn how to separate the “why” and the “what” and start mastering the “why” of the tooling.

Mastering the why will help you understand the concepts and reason about why they are necessary. So next time you move from Github to Gitlab for example, you will notice that they both do the (almost) same thing just with a different logo.

Know your people

Coming back to people. You have to recognize that your success and impact as DevOps “engineer” is your ability to communicate and understand people.

And you will find people from different backgrounds, experience and personalities, that’s ok, use that diversity as a strength rather than as a challenge.

Communication

Learn to articulate and be precise in your speech and writing. It will make your life and your team’s life easier

And yes, you will need to write pipelines :)