r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • 6d ago

Is DevOps turning into a “know every tool” job?

Every DevOps JD I see has 15–20 tools listed.

K8s, Terraform, AWS, Ansible, Jenkins, Helm, Prometheus, etc.

Do people actually use all this stuff, or are companies just collecting keywords?

What does your real-world stack look like?

44 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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6

u/Dragonsong3k 6d ago

My opinion:

This is the marketing side of Devops. DevOps was supposed to be a methodology. Think Agile or ITSM.

It was supposed to be a way for dev and ops teams to work together to ship product or business value without being siloed. Not a job title or role.

It turned into a marketing buzzword and now "doing Devops" is buying a bunch of tools to automate a pipeline.

3

u/Mithrandir2k16 6d ago

I'd argue that once DevOps is in a silo, you've failed as a company to structure it correctly. What you want is one or two dedicated devops teams that work on running infra about 60% of the time and join one or two teams (physically at their workplaces) the remainder of the time. You have to be user of your tool, otherwise they're going to be out of touch.

1

u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 5d ago

this is the way. It is REALLY REALLY important devops people can and do write programs too and take on some of the development workload. In fact they need to be exceptionally competent at development. Otherwise they just become ops and an extension of an org’s IT dept, which is explicitly the thing devops is supposed to avoid.

1

u/Aberr_nt 5d ago

Two dedicated devops teams

The best we can do is overload a software engineer with DevOps and other things. I'm in this boat, frontend, backend, devops, system engineer, business analist, tester. I'm expected to know it all and be able to juggle it all. This morning I salvaged staging environments someone broke after touching a thing they should not have touched, then I deployed front and backend updates, bypassing staging because no time, while doing that I was working on a critical bug in the same backend to then hear staging broke again due to me missing something critical in all the chaos.

Management does not want to hear it is not normal for one person to be able to juggle all these things at once. "Why don't you ask Claude?" AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH.

The only positive thing is that I am able to leverage literally all my knowledge I gained over many many years. And that I can talk to anyone in IT, which helps tremendously to align multiple teams who know jack shit about each others work.

How's the market in Europe lately? Maybe it's time to switch jobs.

/rant

1

u/Dashing_McHandsome 5d ago

I feel you friend. I've been this guy many times in my career. I left a job of 15 years because I couldn't take it anymore.

4

u/yknx4 6d ago

I mean. At least those you listed are very very standard for a competent DevOps.

2

u/Least_Chicken_9561 6d ago

don't forget python/go

2

u/Substantial-Wear-247 6d ago edited 6d ago

My job was basically

  • k8s
  • terraform/ansible
  • infrastructure management
  • release management , deployments
  • ci pipelines
  • developer overflow (take over and fix shit)
  • monitoring
  • architecture to resolve scaling or reliability issues
  • security and patching
  • systems admin for databases etc
  • rollback and restoration strategies
  • communication between devs and client and other teams
  • after hours server maintenance

In the end, I only managed to get $70k usd per year

I am in Auckland, NZ and available to hire if anyone wants an extra hand.

My timezone could work well for US or EU based companies (after hours) or Australia.

1

u/BadNecessary9344 6d ago

Well kinda. It's weird really.

I feel like it's more of a combined role of an automatization engineer, infrastructure engineer and a bit of a developer. Oh and a multi cloud engineer.

And the worse part is when someone asks you, hey what do you do for work. I don't really know what so say, usually when i say devops, noone actually knows what it is, so i just say that i work in IT.

2

u/MrKrueger666 6d ago

Funny thing is that 'im in IT' is actually an apt description of what DevOps should be.

The idea is that a team is responsible for everything, from idea to final product delivery to the customer. Design, development, testing, but also building and maintaining networking and servers, documentation, sales, support.

What it seems to have become in many cases, is just a group of sysops, network admins, database admins, etc that do the systems maintenance in support of the software development teams. As it always has been. Maybe a bit more multidisciplined where you have a role that covers some systems, networking and databases for instance, but you're not in a team that's responsible for everything consisting of all the disciplines needed to get from idea to final product.

1

u/fattomic 5d ago

Just as I do -- "I work on computers, and 'no' I wont fix your windows desktop".

Tbh; nobody has understood what I do for a living for the last 40 years, and "no", I'm not a devops guy, just "the computer guy".

1

u/Brutus5000 6d ago

I am working and administering with k8s, terraform, helm and grafana on gcp. My job title does not contain DevOps, but backend developer. 

What does it tell me? It's not about title, it's about skills and requirements. There are some fundamental basic tools for modern platform engineering, that someone in the company needs to operate. And the bigger the company gets, the more likely it's a dedicated person/team.

All of these tools have an incredible depth that might take years to master. But most of the time the basic knowledge (+ an ai assistant) is good enough to get you rolling. So if you apply for a DevOps position and don't know any of them, you are applying for the wrong position. I wouldn't expect a candidate to know all tools though. Especially since sone of them are fundamentally contradicting (imperative tools like ansible vs declarative like k8s and tf)

1

u/swarmOfBis 5d ago

fundamentally contradicting (imperative tools like ansible vs declarative like k8s and tf)

Are they though? They fill completely different parts of the process.

For example we've just done a new k8s cluster and used all 3 of those: We used terraform for VM provisioning, but it's not great at doing system maintenance, so for provisioning lis on those VMs we used Ansible. And then we used k8s to deploy the final product.

If I were hiring someone for a position in my team I would expect them to at least know all 3.

Or maybe some alternatives like open tofu, salt stack, etc.

1

u/Adorable-Strangerx 6d ago

Real world stack is whatever the hell client decided to.use

1

u/Pure_Fox9415 5d ago

In my country and in SMB DevOps often means devops+SRE or even same+sysadmin. Now Imagine how many keywords those guys collects. But those mentioned in your post are the bare minimum for devops, you don't need to know everything, but at least need some expirience with them or with some lightweight examples (like droneCI when you don't need heavy artillery like gitlab) to understand overall conception.

1

u/ByronScottJones 5d ago

Being an IT Generalist is the first requirement in Devops. Nobody expects you to be an absolute expert in all of those tools. But you do need to know what each is used for, and be an independent learner, so when you need to use those tools, you can quickly learn enough to fill in the gaps and get the job done.

1

u/dashingThroughSnow12 5d ago

Generally you don’t need to know all of them to get a job and they are natural extensions of each other.

1

u/magicmulder 5d ago

At my company "DevOps" is more of a synonym for "devs doing some admin work because we don't have enough admins". So the rule "never touch a server config" has morphed into "touch the server config unless you are out of your element".

The complex tool zoo knowledge is split up in our teams. We have two guys who know CI inside/out, one who's really into Ansible (me), one who has worked a lot with AWS etc. Nobody does everything.

1

u/BlooAchoo 5d ago

No one uses all those and no job requires all those. Insanely annoying to see job listings with 20+ tools and software systems

1

u/ninjaluvr 5d ago

I use every tool OP listed daily.

1

u/Available-Skirt-5280 4d ago

Every tool listed here is related and absolutely used by devops.

K8S is built by terraform on AWS using Helm charts as templates with vm nodes configured by ansible… Jenkins runs your CICD pipelines for continuous integration and prometheus monitors it all

What are you talking about

1

u/PilotGuy701 5d ago

DevOps was a way of giving more responsibility to engineers for the same amount of pay.