DevOps is not just a set of tools, methods and practices, but a whole movement that helps developers, operations engineers, monitoring and support services to find a common language and launch projects from the beginning to the end.

About the beginning of my career path
While still a student, I started working in the call-center of an ISP as a technical support specialist. There I realized that the work in the technical support though fun, but not very interesting. After college I got a job as a system administrator. I supported users, servers, routers and other hardware. Nowadays it is called a fancy combination: full-stack-admin.

I have been a sysadmin for about seven years now. I managed to gain experience working with helpdesk-departments, went as far as designing and implementing my own architecture, optimized IT-infrastructure in companies, recruited and trained people for the formation of the 1st-3rd lines of technical support.

At some point I heard the new word DevOps. A year and a half of intensive self-study followed. And I became a devops engineer. Now I supervise the work of specialists in the group of automating the processes of developing digital solutions. We are engaged in automation of software delivery to the testing, production and so on. We develop DevOps-practices, make things better and more comfortable for everyone.

What makes good DevOps engineers?
There’s a joking definition that DevOps is a sysadmin on steroids. The path to DevOps is well formed when you already have extensive knowledge of the infrastructure, experience with the architecture of the company as a whole – where and which solutions are best to use both at the software and hardware level, when it’s better on premise, when it is worth looking at the public cloud, when it is better to use good old SQL, and where it makes sense to use modern noSQL databases, when rabbit / Kafka will be useful and not harmful, when it is better to use a small script on bash, and when it is “use Ansible”, when iops, inode and other terms are not empty words.

It’s not necessarily the case that DevOps grows out of sysadmins. Another way is to get out of development. For example, a person goes to work as a software developer, but later understands for some reason that it does not suit him very well, he is attracted to infrastructure and debug related to infra. The ideal choice in this situation is to move from development to DevOps/SRE.

But you have to understand that it’s hard, sometimes even impossible, to describe with some specific tasks a specialist working on DevOps practices in a company. In one project or stream, an expert will conditionally create a pipeline of delivery of microservices to testing and production servers without going into details of what kind of microservices and what software is used for them. And in the neighboring stream DevOps will be deploying legacy code and databases, determining which tables are needed in the database, which legacy application with which can stand on the same server, and which can’t. In the third, a specialist will code the infrastructure, taking care of the reliability and performance of the systems as a whole. The level of abstraction and product immersion can be diametrically opposed from project to project.

To work with DevOps practices, you need to feel free to work within the containerization ideology, understand it not as the only docker containers, but also understand other systems: Linux Containers, Podman and so on. Podman is slowly coming to the forefront, but in general it is very similar to Docker.

Next, master orchestration with Kubernetes alternatives: Docker Swarm, Rancher, Nomad, and OpenShift. OpenShift is a paid solution from Red Hat, based on k8s with nice and handy bonuses from RedHat, second most popular after Kubernetes.

What gradation do DevOps engineers have
Junes should know Linux. At least superficial knowledge of kernel, confident working with the command line, SELinux system and iptables utility.

From the tools you have to learn Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Helm, Git, Zabbix, ELK, Nexus, Prometheus and Grafana. For databases, it’s a good idea to learn MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server.

Middles should be able to do anything with a Linux server or virtual machine at the snap of their fingers. For example, run commands remotely, correctly assign rights to users, configure policies on SELinux and filters in iptables, write automation scripts, break everything and fix it quickly.

Senor will be different in scale. He is not looking at an individual machine, but at the IT infrastructure as a whole. It solves problems of the level of “how to raise and configure the environment with Ansible and Terraform”, “how to configure integration with related systems and take into account all the nuances of implementation.

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Another profession in the field of system administration is a network administrator. Such specialists are responsible for the performance of the network. They work not only with the connection of the computer, but also perform many other actions. This may be setting up the connection of offices, setting routing rules, monitoring the performance of network equipment and the urgent correction of problems in his work.

Also, administration involves the work of such a specialist as a Windows administrator. Such an employee makes sure that all the devices running on this operating system work correctly. This is the installation of software, connectivity, upgrading, updating of various applications and services, logging users of the system. In addition, such specialists make sure that specific users have access to specific applications and services. It also happens that the administration of workstations and servers is two separate areas, so separate groups of administrators work in such areas. Linux administrators deal with all the work associated with installing, configuring and fixing errors in the Linux operating system.

Administration also includes such specialists who deal with virtualization. For example, if one server is running several operating systems at once, they are able to configure the operation of such operating systems. Specialist divides the resources of the server to each individual operating system to work correctly. This is necessary in order to have, for example, 5-7 different operating systems on one common server.

Additionally there is such a direction as the administration of databases. Databases need to be used in order to store arrays of information. This can be user information or it can be information that is used by different programs. Such an administrator configures and installs management systems, maintains them, including diagnostics, optimization, troubleshooting of problems in operation. Also a specialist restores databases, backs them up. Imaging systems, database management systems can be different, so ACS specialists can also have different areas of expertise.

Employees who are responsible for storages, work with data storages. They maintain them, allocate space, conduct data backups. Also their work is aimed at copying data to different storage locations or other geographical locations. Such activity is called replication. These are the specialists who go to such specialists in order to get free space or to get information about the fact that backups are created.

Another line of business is unified communications administrators. They configure, install, configure each individual system which is connected to telephony, email, voice conferences or, for example, internal chat. System administrators also include employees who deal with equipment. These are the engineers who make adjustments and repairs to all of the computer equipment the company has. For example, if a storage system administrator needs to replace a hard drive, he or she goes to the engineer with such a request.

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We’ll talk about the hard stuff, such as creating a certain mindset in supporting IT infrastructure, segregating duties, following the job description and moving to remote work.

To better understand what the position of “network administrator” is, let’s look at the process of its emergence in the company.

Initially, a small firm quite manage the services of a single system administrator, sometimes in the role of the administrator coming.

The network is small, the computers are few, partly using cloud servers, some kind of their own NAS for backups, in general, the business somehow manages to survive.

Time passes and one “multi-armed shiva” is no longer enough for all the infrastructure maintenance tasks. The company management thinks about hiring a second “IT guy”. Often the impetus for this decision is the need to give a legal vacation to the only system administrator.

A second person appears in the IT department, not necessarily with the same knowledge set and job description, for example, this can be a techsupport specialist, a 1C programmer, a web programmer, etc. As you have time to notice, this is not yet a network administrator. Because the network is not so large yet, and the efforts of the server (not network) sysadmin is quite enough to keep it afloat.

Interesting trend
It is common practice when network management is initially hinged on anyone. For example, on the system administrator, or even on the programmer 1C. The results of this “delegation of network authority” is not difficult to predict.
The position of “network engineer” usually appears when the business has already grown decently, rose to his feet, and he needed a developed network. That is, his system administrator, his engineer and even a programmer is already recruited and shared responsibilities, but for the network administrator is quite a specific list of jobs.
The need for a network administrator appears in one of two reasons:

The company’s network has grown large enough that there aren’t enough employees to maintain a large infrastructure.
The company’s network has become more complex, security requirements have risen, which has increased labor costs and required additional expertise.

And now, after all the twists and turns, the company has an employee whose job will be to take care of the computer network. But do not hurry to rejoice, there are still a lot of interesting things ahead.

Who and how determines the duties of a network administrator

From the standpoint of the network administrator, he is responsible for operating and monitoring the network, advises on the configuration of client equipment, performs firmware updates and makes backups of configurations on time. Sometimes this is supplemented by advice on purchasing and accounting for existing units of network equipment.

Unfortunately, very often the management does not understand how serious demands set to the network administrator by life itself and how much work he has to do to maintain the proper level of skill.

People, little related to IT, continue to evaluate the work of IT experts on the Soviet principle of “plan-o-volu – val-o-planu”, that is, by the primitive quantitative indicators. For example, a server engineer installed and configured a huge blade system, plus a storage system consisting of a controller and several disk “shelves”. Such work is immediately visible to the naked eye. And if you add a tape library the size of half a server rack – that’s even cool!

And try to prove under such circumstances that these “little boxes” called gateways, routers, switches and access points require no less configuration effort than the “wealth” described above. Alas, not the “scale of accomplishment”.

And where there is no understanding, there is a persistent desire to “add to the missing amount of work to be done”. For example, to plant in the job description of the network administrator points about the management of servers. Why, because the servers are connected to the network? And the workstations are also in the network?

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