Developer platforms vs cloud-native: where do you draw the line?

DevOps community,
When do you recommend teams move from easy platforms (Vercel, Heroku, etc.) to managing their own cloud infrastructure?
What’s usually the breaking point - cost, scale, compliance, team size?
And what’s your experience helping teams make that transition? Any tools that bridge the gap nicely?

https://redd.it/1nvtq0j
@r_devops

Looking for Real-World DevOps Practice Resources/Projects

I'm a backend developer with foundational DevOps experience (VPS deployment, Docker, K8s clusters) and I'm looking to level up my skills with hands-on practice. I'm specifically NOT interested in platform services like Vercel - I want to work with the actual infrastructure layer.

**My current situation:**

* Can deploy applications (done VPS, Docker, K8s)
* Want to practice advanced DevOps concepts
* Don't want to wait until I build complex backends to practice
* Need real-world scenarios and challenges

**What I'm looking for:**

* Practice labs or environments where I can break things and learn
* Projects that simulate production issues (incidents, scaling, monitoring)
* Resources for implementing observability stacks, GitOps, IaC, service mesh, etc.
* Chaos engineering scenarios
* Real infrastructure challenges, not just tutorials

https://redd.it/1nvujkc
@r_devops

Seeking an Advanced AI PR Review Tool that Catches Logical Oversight

Hey everyone,
**TLDR: I'm looking for an AI PR review tool for Azure DevOps that finds deep logical flaws and incomplete features. Claude code catches this oversight FYI**

I'm on the hunt for a truly intelligent AI PR review tool, and I'm hoping to get some recommendations from the community.

I'm looking for a tool that can act more like a human reviewer—an "agentic" tool that can traverse the codebase to understand the full context of a change and point out when a feature is incomplete or logically flawed.

To give a concrete example of what I mean, we recently had a PR that SonarCloud's AI feature completely missed. The goal was to add a "Discontinued" status for products in our e-commerce system.

The developer made these changes:

```diff
// --- a/src/Enums/ProductStatus.cs
public enum ProductStatus {
Available,
OutOfStock,
+ Discontinued,
}

// --- a/src/Models/ProductDetailsDto.cs
public class ProductDetailsDto {
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public bool IsInStock { get; set; }
+ public bool IsDiscontinued { get; set; }
}

// --- a/src/Services/ProductAvailabilityService.cs
public class ProductAvailabilityService {
public ProductStatus GetProductStatus(ProductDetailsDto product) {
// OVERSIGHT: The new 'IsDiscontinued' flag is fetched but never checked!
// An AI reviewer should flag that this new property is unused in the logic that determines status.
if (!product.IsInStock) {
return ProductStatus.OutOfStock;
}

return ProductStatus.Available;
}
}
```

This PR had two major oversights that a human reviewer would spot, but the AI didn't:

1. **The Logical Flaw:** The `ProductAvailabilityService` was never updated to check the `IsDiscontinued` flag. The new `ProductStatus.Discontinued` enum is effectively dead code and would never be returned.
2. **The Architectural Flaw:** The PR introduced the *concept* of a discontinued product but included no endpoint, service, or mechanism to actually *set* a product as discontinued. The feature was fundamentally incomplete.

This is the kind of critical feedback I'm looking for from an AI tool. I want suggestive comments right in the PR that highlight these kinds of oversights.

I know that **"GPT-5-Codex" is good for conducting code reviews and finding critical flaws.** I'm wondering if this level of technology has made its way into any practical tools yet, especially as a plugin for **Azure DevOps**, which is our platform.

So, my question to the community is: **What are you using that can catch these kinds of complex logical issues?**

I'm looking for a tool that:
* Performs deep logical analysis, not just static analysis.
* Is context-aware and can understand the purpose of a change across multiple files.
* Can identify security vulnerabilities that require understanding business logic.
* **Integrates smoothly with Azure DevOps.**
* Writes clear, actionable comments in the PR review.

Have you had success with tools like GitHub Copilot for PRs, CodeRabbit, Bito, Tabnine, or others for these kinds of complex issues? Any hidden gems out there that go beyond the basics?

Thanks in advance for your help

https://redd.it/1nvv5ox
@r_devops

SMS alerts for infra monitoring What’s reliable?

We want to integrate SMS alerts into our monitoring setup for server downtime and urgent incidents. Tried one provider but messages sometimes arrive late, which defeats the point.
Any recommendations for something more reliable than Twilio/Bandwidth?

https://redd.it/1nvwljd
@r_devops

How do you deal with legacy systems that just refuse to die?

I’m at a company that still runs on a bunch of legacy systems, and honestly, it feels like we’re fighting them every day. Any time we try to roll out something new, we get stuck doing a ton of manual work because the old stuff doesn’t play nice.

Half of my time isn’t even spent building, it’s spent babysitting systems that should’ve been retired five years ago. But management doesn’t want to touch them because “they still work.”

Anyone else stuck in this loop? How do you deal with modernizing without breaking half your environment or getting buried in tech debt?

https://redd.it/1nvxjl8
@r_devops

why monorepos??

just got a question can anybody explain me that i have gone through various organizations repos and found that they all are monorepo while in market people craze and talk about the importance of having the microservices.. then why companies prefer to have this monorepo structure only.. vast majorites of repos are all monorepo only.. its because they are old or is there any other reason..

great to know your insights..

https://redd.it/1nvy3if
@r_devops

awsui：A modern Textual-powered AWS CLI TUI

Hi everyone, I'm currently a DevOps/SRE engineer.

# Why build this?

When using the AWS CLI, I sometimes need to switch between multiple profiles. It's easy to forget a profile name, which means I have to spend extra time searching.

So, I needed a tool that not only integrated AWS profile management and quick switching capabilities, but also allowed me to execute AWS CLI commands directly within it. Furthermore, I wanted to be able to directly call AWS Q to perform tasks or ask questions.

# What can awsui do?

Built by Textual, awsui is a completely free and open-source TUI tool that provides the following features:

* Quickly switch and manage AWS profiles.
* Use auto-completion to execute AWS CLI commands without memorizing them.
* Integration with AWS Q eliminates the need to switch between terminal windows.

If you encounter any issues or have features you'd like to see, please feel free to let me know and I'll try to make improvements and fixes as soon as possible.

**GitHub Repo:** [https://github.com/junminhong/awsui](https://github.com/junminhong/awsui)

I hope this helps others facing the same challenges, thanks!

https://redd.it/1nw36nq
@r_devops

New DevOos role has me spread so thin, I feel I'm not able to learn core tools. Normal?

I started a role as a DevOps engineer in April '25 having around 10 years experience as a SysAdmin + 3 years as a Cloud Engineer. The company is a smaller mid-size with 5k employees. The advertised stack I'd be supporting in the role was: AWS, K8s (+Helm, Flux, etc.), some Azure, Terraform, Gitlab... standard stuff.

The issue I'm having is that for the last several months, I am bombarded by ad-hoc tasks that have pulled me away from the core tech stack listed above, being assigned things like ticket resolution, administrative or small SysAdmin troubleshooting tasks, billing tasks, user issues with tooling, VM deployments, contract renewals, and the list goes on and on. I feel as though I'm drowning in these types of "one-off" issues, and have been hardly able to upskill on the core tools pitched to me during my the interview process.

One major issue I see is the lack of any project management staff/office at this employer, which has lead to several projects running late with no real defined requirements. Additionally, teams run a pseudo-scrum workflow, but there doesn't seem to be any timelines set for projects because we are constantly shifting our priorities. There is no formal ticket queue management process. Folks just pick them up as they see fit, and most fall on the junior folks.

I'm increasingly frustrated at my inability to focus on a project due to the context switching being asked of me, and cannot see how I will be able to attain mastery of some of these core DevOps tools in this environment.

Hoping to hear from some of you folks regarding your experiences and if this sounds normal or not?

Thanks!

https://redd.it/1nw52pd
@r_devops

On-prem IaC: Where do you draw the line between Terraform and Ansible?

At my new job we manage on-prem infra and are automating with Ansible. The cloud teams here rely heavily on Terraform, which got me wondering:

Does Terraform really have a place on-prem?

If so, where do you draw the line between Terraform and Ansible (or maybe other tools)?

I understand it that terraform is for provisioning and ansible is for configuring

Curious what you guys think about it
Cheers 😄

https://redd.it/1nw6sga
@r_devops

Got blamed for an outage I didn’t even cause

We had a rough incident last week where staging went down for hours. The root cause was a terraform destroy that got executed by an automated job after a junior triggered it.

In the postmortem, the blame still landed on me since I own infra. The reality is I never pushed a button, Terraform just followed the instructions it was given, and the pipeline behaved exactly as designed.

That said, it was on me to get things back online. I re-synced the state, made a few YAML changes, redeployed services, and eventually got staging running again.

Has anyone else had to deal with cleaning up a major mess caused by someone else, but still ended up carrying the responsibility?

https://redd.it/1nw756h
@r_devops

Biometric Breach Vector: The reverse search tool that bypassed our basic IAM and access controls.

I run a small DevOps team, and we were doing a casual security audit on our personal digital footprints. We used a powerful biometric search engine to test the integrity of our own security posture.

The audit started with faceseek. I uploaded an ancient, low-res picture of one of our developers that was on a completely separate, non-work-related platform. The goal was to see if the tool could map that face to anything related to our company.

The terrifying discovery: It mapped that single photo to a non-face PFP used on a personal Gitlab repo that contained a legacy, exposed API key (the developer thought the repo was locked down and unindexed). The biometrics served as the unexpected bridge between personal life and professional exposure.

This is a serious security vector. It proves that the weakest link in our Identity and Access Management (IAM) isn't the password or the 2FA token; it's the permanently indexed biometric hash of our team members.

Question for r/devops: How are you integrating biometric threat awareness into your security pipeline? Is anyone using tooling in their CI/CD to audit their own employees' publicly indexable biometric data to preemptively find these kinds of cross-platform security vulnerabilities? We need to treat this as a systemic risk.

https://redd.it/1nw9fm5
@r_devops

Devops/sre engineer with 10 years of experience how to get into quant firms?

Hi all

I’ve been working as an SRE/DevOps engineer for 10 years (CI/CD, infra automation, deployments, monitoring etc). Lately I’ve been curious about roles in quant/prop trading firms.

For someone with my background, should I focus on: • Linux internals & low-level system performance? • Programming (C++/Python) for low-latency systems? • Or just keep building infra/data pipelines?

Also, what roles make sense for me — quant dev, trading infra engineer, low-latency SRE?

Anyone here actually doing SRE/infra at a quant shop — would love to hear what skills really matter and how different it is from regular tech companies.

Thanks!

https://redd.it/1nwaj4v
@r_devops

Would you say that devops has a higher element of customer service / people interaction than pure infrastructure work?

I see a common pattern among some pretty brilliant IT engineers I’ve worked with in the past who have transitioned to devops: they thrive on project work where they’re heads down and just build, but when it comes to explaining things to a stakeholder, reaching across silos to get tasks done or even just being a team player and helping someone figure shit out - they are unable to do the basic required things in these scenarios. We have had to let go two engineers at my company because we’re a contract shop and when we have clients who need us to lead the way, these guys just fall over. I don’t know how to suss personality and culture here because not every scenario is cut and dried “you need to be a people person” shit. Much of it is just common sense about owning your shit. Any advice?

https://redd.it/1nw8551
@r_devops

Development philosophies of error-handling for sysadmin-type tasks?

I don't know exactly how to search for what I'm looking for, so figured I'd ask here:

I have this codebase I've inherited that is basically one big Ansible project (sensibly broken up into roles, don't worry) that does a bunch of validations before running dnf update on a group of servers and reporting the results.

As you might expect there's a number of places during the process where we want it to stop and report back, like if you don't own the systems in question or if you're trying to run the procedure outside of your scheduled change window or if the servers can't be reached for some reason, etc.

As a sysadmin first and developer second, I've always kind of struggled with how to develop procedural tasks such as this in a way that they can fail gracefully at a given point without doing lots of "do task, if it fails report this specific error, otherwise do next task, if it fails this way do this error run otherwise do that one otherwise do next task" and so on. Are there any good resources on best practices / design patterns for this kind of work, preferably ones that a non-CompSci doofus can understand? They don't have to be Ansible-specific, I'm looking more for basic theory, if such a thing exists.

https://redd.it/1nwaxcq
@r_devops

Super micromanaging boss

So I joined this new org almost a year ago and our boss is really starting to get on my nerves woth micromanaging.

Our daily meetings are 1h long with 4ppl in team, coz he either talks about w/e stuff or asks about every detail of everything you do.

We have pretty strong team with competent ppl that know how to accomplish our goals. But he keeps on butting in in every small detail even if he does not understand the tech behind solutions we want to implement or argues with us we are wrong coz he heard or this or that.

Every single time he does that - later it turns out we were right and we did everything best we could and all needs are met.

We constantly have to do some refinements and knowledge sharing for w/e reason. I feel like he lost purpose and is trying to prove he is still useful for his boss, while we can pretty much replace him in any work he previously did and most likely better.

Worst part is when that micromanaging and will to „prove himself” makes us look bad when we discuss stuff with platform teams. Ppl that worked with F500s and we discuss stuff like ROI, complex architectures or new tools. Manager butts in, doesnt even understand what they talk about or refuses to accept some ideas (mostly good ones) and makes us look stupid. Imagine DTrump talking to ppl with 30 years of experience „ypu dont know shit”..

Its embarassing for us. I know he has good intentions but I dont know how to tell him to „chill out” on those actions, coz he has rly smart ppl on the board in team that know wth we are doing and we all worked at Senior to Staff level engineering roles.

Its just exhausing to sit through 2h meetings that could be 30m or discuss with architects have all planned and someone butts in to change stuff we already agreed on.

Anyone had such boss and could give some tips on how to politely fine-tune him ?

https://redd.it/1nwfu17
@r_devops

How to Handle a Career Gap While Applying for DevOps/SRE Roles?

Hey everyone,

I’d really appreciate some advice from folks who have gone through this.

I have about 4 years of professional experience as a DevOps/Infrastructure Engineer where I worked with AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, and monitoring tools like Prometheus/Grafana. Most of my work was around automating deployments, setting up CI/CD, and supporting production infrastructure.

Due to personal circumstances, I had to take a step back from full-time work for about 2 years. During that time, I focused on recovery, picked up certifications (AWS Cloud Practitioner, GitOps), and did some personal lab projects (Terraform IaC, Jenkins pipelines, K8s deployments). I also enrolled in a Master’s program to strengthen my technical foundation.

Now I’m actively applying for **DevOps/SRE roles in the U.S.** but I’m hitting a wall — lots of applications, very few responses. I suspect the unexplained gap is a red flag for recruiters.

My questions are:

* How should I present this gap on my resume/LinkedIn?
* Is it worth creating a “Career Break & Professional Development” section to show I was still learning/building projects?
* For those who’ve been in a similar spot, how did you explain the gap during interviews?

Any advice or real-world examples would be hugely helpful. I want to make sure this gap doesn’t overshadow the skills I bring to the table.

Thanks in advance!

https://redd.it/1nwe937
@r_devops

Is DevOps freelancing realistic, or should I pivot ?

I like cloud and recently passed the AWS SAA. I’m currently learning Terraform, and since I’m from a third-world country, freelancing is my main plan once I reach a solid skill level.

My concern is whether DevOps freelancing is realistic, especially for someone with no prior experience. Most DevOps work seems to require long-term trust and deep integration with company systems, which doesn’t always fit the “freelancer” model. That makes me wonder if I should instead invest my time in backend or full-stack development, which clearly have stronger freelancing markets.

So I’d love to hear from those with experience:

Is DevOps freelancing actually a viable path?

Or would it be smarter to focus on something else?

https://redd.it/1nwj3b7
@r_devops

Startup, Leadership wants to bring in people to all live in a mansion for a week to do intense collab when we work WFH, your thoughts?

Leadership wants to bring in core devs, devops, software dev leadership, and support, to have long collab sessions for a week in a large mansion essentially. They will provide all the accommodations, including lodging, tickets, food that the support (not tech support, more like people like project managers) will cook.

Would you embrace? Would you push back on it? Decline it?

https://redd.it/1nwgkuq
@r_devops

Thoughts on Aiven vs cloud vendor services?

Aiven offers managed versions of open-source tools (Postgres, MySQL, Kafka, Redis, ClickHouse, etc.) across multiple clouds. They pitch it as avoiding vendor lock-in while still getting fully managed infra. Anyone here using it in production? Worth it vs the native AWS/GCP/Azure databases?

https://redd.it/1nwjvpj
@r_devops

Curious how's the market right now in North America.

Who's looking for a DevOps position? How do you feel the market is right now? About remote, seems like companies want back to office even more.

https://redd.it/1nworvh
@r_devops

Are DevOps services actually worth it for small teams?

Hey all, not usually in this sub (I’m a product person, not ops), but I figured you’d know best.

Our small SaaS team is drowning in infra... suff like broken deploys, weird billing spikes and no one who really wants to own “ops.” I keep seeing DevOps services advertised as a way to fix this. They claim they’ll handle pipelines, monitoring, scaling, etc. so your devs can stay focused on product.

On paper it sounds amazing, but I’ve never talked to anyone who’s actually used them... guide me please

https://redd.it/1nwiu55
@r_devops