Hi everyone! My name is Fernando Garcia (twitter: @su_xcode ). I'm one out of five DevOps engineers that work day and night for production operations at Playstation in San Francisco.
What kind of things do people in this field want to know? Are you interviewing for any DevOps jobs? I can give you some tips if you need any.
I have a great set of interview answers that would help you. I can give real world scenarios of what to do, and what not to do.
I wrote all kinds of Ansible roles, python scripts, bash one-offs, and all other fun automated stuff. One day, I'd like to get my story of how I ended up working for a company like Sony with no college degree written somewhere. It's a long story, full of long nights, harsh struggles, the loss of a mentor, and really trying to stay afloat in the super expensive bay area.
A little about myself:
I never went to college; not by choice, strictly because I was just too poor at the time to afford it. One day I'd love to actually go to college and get a degree. One day.
My background consists of a wild plethora of random jobs. Once I was a ramp manager at San Jose, Airport. You know, one of those guys that would hold those glow sticks and guide the plane into the terminal. Followed by being a mechanic at a small mom and pop shop. It was thanks to that mechanic job that introduced me to a hiring manager for some tire delivery service. It wasn't glorious, but it payed a lot better than my $7.50/hr mechanic job. It was the most important and beneficial decision I ever made. Getting that "large truck driver" experience landed me a job as a freight delivery guy for Cisco Systems. It's a long story as to how I ended up working in tech, but to sum it up it went like this: Delivering boxes and pallets of routers and switches got pretty boring really quick, so I got nosy and started asking the managers there how a guy like me can work in the datacenter. I met some awesome lab managers and landed a job as a rack-n-stack cable monkey. I say that lovingly.
Fast forward a couple years, long nights of reading, studying, online courses, I became A+ Certified, CCNA certified, Linux+ Certified, MCSA Certified, and currently in the process of getting AWS certified.
So people of dev.to, where do I start? How do I do this? Because like most things in my life, I'm just going with the flow and let time and gravity guide me. I hope to meet some cool people while I'm here!
Top comments (3)
I'm an SRE lead with Bethesda.net, and I want to know why first party login requests take so long? =P
Actually, this makes me wonder if there's a good way to connect DevOps teams across dependent service providers. The perspectives we have on our systems varies from how feature teams typically approach them, yet that seems to always be the primary or only touch point.
Hi Fernando! :)
I currently work as a NOC operator, and am looking to make the transition to DevOps engineer.
"I'm one out of five DevOps engineers that work day and night for production operations at Playstation in San Francisco." - What's your typical schedule look like? How's the on-call rotation?
What was the interview process like? Did/do you need to have a portfolio?
How accurate would you say this list of for becoming a DevOps engineer?
javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/09...
Hi Xavier,
That's awesome! We have a great relationship with NOC operators at Playstation. They are our eyes and ears 24/7 when our monitoring misses something :)
4 years ago, I went through their interview process and it was tough. I didn't need a portfolio. Keep in mind I interviewed before a lot of the things I had to learn about wasn't available for AWS at the time (AWS Secrets as an example).
Be sure to know Linux inside and out. Know how to troubleshoot random issues by utilizing
lsof.For example, how do you find the
pidNAME of a file that's opened.Knowing your linux is half the battle. Then you need to know about the SDLC, be prepared to be able to go into detail when you explain CI/CD, and they'll probably be knit picky and ask you what the difference is between Continuous delivery vs continuous deployments.
The link you sent me is pretty accurate. Understanding inside and out linux and the anatomy of a web server takes up most of the middle of the page, so you really should know that if you want to succeed.
Scripting languages: Know your Bash, Python, Ruby (If they're a Chef shop), and Node.js if you're supporting a web application.
Rust and Go are still in the experiment phases over at playstation, but we have built some custom K8s tooling with Go. Those two languages can wait for now. Stick with learning Python first.
Also, learn how to deploy an application using Jenkins. You're not limited to Jenkins, but that's almost the cultural norm around here. Circle CI is also cool, but it's tough adopting to it since a lot of "set in stone" tech stacks are heavily embedded with Jenkins.
Lastly, know your Log aggregation tool. Whether it's SPLUNK or Kibana. They love someone who can just get up and start searching complex searches in their stack.
How to build and use Data visualization tools like Grafana or DataDog will also very much help you.