Dev Net Associate - Question

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Just wanted to run something by you all for your very valued opinions.

A couple of years ago I picked up my Cisco CCNA. The courses were great and once I passed, I was over the moon! Then COVID hit, I got made redundant and took the first job I could get.

Im really interested in Dev Ops so was thinking maybe its worth looking at the DevNet Associate exam. Number of reasons:

• Covers a lot of aspects of Dev Ops,
• We have a corporate Oreily Books account so can get the Video Course, Official Press and Practice Exams for £0.00,
  
• It would give my networking skills a refresh too.

 

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Some interesting content on the exam, but there are far better uses of your time if you want to get into DevOps

I'd consider doing certs in the following:

• AWS
• Azure
• GCP
• Terraform
• Kubernetes

Honestly the best (and quickest) route in would be to do the following:

• Dockerise a web application
• Create a managed kubernetes cluster using terraform (in one of the major cloud providers)
• Set up CI/CD pipelines to build the container and deploy to the cluster
• Serve the app publicly so recruiters/hiring managers can view the website
• Do all of the above with git (at the command line) and push all of the code to github
• Show your repos to hiring managers. Explain why you made certain design decisions, be confident in explaining what you've done and why

If you can do all of the above and can confidently describe everything you've done and why, you're ready an entry level DevOps role. In fact most engineers I work with probably couldn't (cba to) do all of that.

Certs are great. I'm actually working on my GCP architect cert right now, but you'll be judged on your skills.

Saying that, the AWS Pro DevOps engineer will cover most of above and I'm considering doing it myself in future..

I still recommend going the non-cert route because it's quicker, you'll learn a tonne - not just about the concepts and tooling but how to obtain information for yourself, and making all of that stuff work is really, really satisfying.

You need to get comfortable with linux, git, bash and coding in general. But you don't need to be an expert in linux these days in my experience. You'll need to be decent with bash but you don't need to know everything about the OS. You probably did prior to containerisation, but not now.

VSCode seems to be the standard for IDEs in this field. I used vim for ages, but I've forced myself to use VSCode now, just cause it's easier to manage plugins etc

Also, I noticed you're wanting to learn python. That will also be useful, but not necessary for your first job.

Edit, actually it probably would be good to go through the course content for a cloud engineer cert so you have an understanding of how Cloud Platforms work in general. How to configure VPCs, IAM, Differences between IaaS, PaaS etc, firewall rules. It should all make sense to you if you have background with that stuff on-prem but the implementation is slightly different. Also good to get used to the CLI utilities and how to query the APIs (az/Azure Powershell, gcloud aws-cli.)

Good luck.

 

Agreed with others comments.

I wouldn't be looking at certification at all.

1. Learn Docker and Docker Compose basics (Pluralsight / Udemy)
2. Learn Linux/Bash command line basics (Pluralsight / Blogs)
3. Learn Git basics, use your own repos locally and use a remote repo like GitHub or BitBucket (Pluralsight)
4. Play with stuff like GitOps, Circle CI, GCP Cloud Build, Jenkins, Azure DevOps Pipelines
5. Learn Kubernetes basics, probably using docker desktop, then maybe use a Cloud provider (Pluralsight)
6. Learn basics of at least one cloud platform, AWS, GCP, Azure. I prefer GCP for beginners. (Coursera)
7. Learn a bit about artifact repos like Nexus, Artifactory etc.
8. Understand basics of Agile/Kanban/Scrum as well as collabartion tools like Jira/Confluence.
9. Basic understanding of scanning tools like SonarQube and OWASP.
10. Basic understanding of Monitoring using Prometheus/Nagios/DataDog.
11. Basic understanding of common infrastructure components like Load balancers, API gateways, Web Servers, RDBMs.
12. Understanding of Infrastructure as Code

A lot of cloud providers provide courses on Coursera now that include virtual labs, Pluralsight and Udemy also provide test apps etc.
So you can practice using the DevOps tools without writing application code to create applications to deploy.

Some places are using Terraform so that might be useful depending.

You don't need Python really for most DevOps jobs but it would be nice if you knew one programming language later, and if you don't know any, Python would be a good choice.

Things like Mesos, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Vagrant are kinda legacy now so I'd avoid unless you have a particular requirement.

A lot of places are using public cloud, this would allow you to practice basic networking and it doesn't need Cisco knowledge or certification.

Online CBT and Blogs is normally faster than books. Oreilly books are ok but really probably not the best use of your time at this point. If you need a deep dive on a subject that has stable knowledge then I go buy and read a book cover to cover. This normally takes 3 months, so I don't do it that often. Most the DevOps stuff does not have good books and the toolchains change fast enough to make most books useless.

Consider looking at Job boards for popular DevOps requirements and stuff you wanna learn to land a job. Once you land a job focus on your weak areas specific to that role.

Other things place might want CloudFormation, VmWare, PKI/MTLS, Powershell, Cloudfront, API gateways. Kibana, ElasticSearch, Helm, Hashicorp Vault. Probably can wait and learn these on the job.

Certify on subjects later only when there is a clear ROI like a major promotion.

 

Fantastic advise as always chaps. Thank you.

Ive currently got an old MacBook Pro setup and I am working through Docker as we speak.
Ive added Linux, Git and Kubernetes to my Whiteboard also so I have plenty of things to work on.

Once Ive got an understanding, Im going to start creating some projects as suggested by Pseudonym.
Ive got my AWS CCP and Azure fundamentals so will take a look at GCP as well so thats the hat-trick there.

Im also working through Linked In for Junior Dev Ops roles.

Cheers Guys!

 

Make sure anything you deploy into the Cloud is built using IaC, too. (Usually terraform).