What I Do as a DevOps Consultant
In practice, and talking from my experience, unless you're one of the lucky few this is what it really means to do DevOps in 2019:- Forget what the books said, theory, semantics and idealism. You are a DevOps Engineer, working in a platform specific team.- You deal with Jenkins or similar, and consult other teams or developers to write scripts for it, or worse, do the work for them since they're too busy doing actual programming.- Contrary to what they say, other than tiny scripts you are not programming much anymore, unless you consider configuration management to be programming.- You are not allowed to come up with your own abstractions. Proposals to develop anything are automatically declined by your Product Owner, who simply points you to whatever tool with a fancy logo he could find listed in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.- You pride yourself for being an engineer, but decisions end up being only made in terms of getting free open source labor and ease up hiring, so you end up doing what everyone else is doing.- Half of your team co-workers are perfectly fine dealing with churn, software updates and other sort of manual, classic sysadmin tasks.- You are repeatedly being paged at night for problems that your fellow developers won't feel responsible for. You hear buzzwords and talks about this SRE thing or "you built it, you run it", but it never seems to materialise due to politics.- You are getting a feel that cloud providers are not really making things easier nor cheaper.It used to be a lot of fun back in the day, and a great chance to get paid to solve interesting problems related to system and infrastructure engineering instead of the boring CRUD work that plagued the last decades, but seeing the "App Store" that this turned into, if you are a creative individual with a software engineering background and you're considering a career in DevOps, my advice is to run away while you can.