DevOps as a progressive and conservative field

DevOps as a progressive and conservative field

On one hand, DevOps as a term is still fairly young compared to many other things in IT, while on the other hand it is built on technologies that have been around for many years. And that makes it a doubly interesting direction for personal growth.

*️⃣Let's take software development for comparison, or rather one of its quite popular parts — frontend. It seems like getting into it isn't all that hard or time-consuming, but there's a catch. Yes, to work at a given moment in time and on a particular project you need to know the basics of the language and the specifics of the framework.

That's much easier than DevOps, where you need to understand many things.

However, it later turns out that the code you wrote behaves differently than planned on certain devices, browsers, users (fill in your own). And later, on a neighboring project, you find out they use a different framework and you have to learn it. And a year or two later yet another trendy framework comes out and life forces you to learn it too. Mobile development, by the way, hasn't gone far in this respect either.

In DevOps it's different: the number of tools you need to know isn't that small, but it is quite finite, and the most popular ones can be counted on the fingers of one hand. On top of that, fundamental knowledge is always valued: Linux, networking, containers, IaC, CI/CD.

I regularly get questions like:

❔"Are you sure that the things I learn will still be relevant in a year or two?" My answer is simple and clear: absolutely.

My courses contain no fleeting, just-emerged technologies, only time-tested things that have been with us for 10 years or more. And of course, those are exactly the ones that show up most often in job requirements.

🙂 That said, this doesn't mean everything stands still and never changes for years; changes do happen, this is inevitable and wonderful. We simply watch them and apply the best approaches in our work.