Can the CKA replace real k8s experience in job hunting?

Senior DevOps engineer here, at a biotech company. My specific team supports more on the left side of the SDLC, helping developers create and improve build pipelines, integrating cloud resources into that process like S3, EC2, and creating self-help jobs on Jenkins/GitHub actions.

TLDR, I need to find another job. However, most DevOps jobs ive seen require k8s at scale- focusing on reliability/observability. I have worked with Kubernetes lightly, inspecting pod failures etc, but nothing that would allow me to deploy and maintain a kubernetes cluster. Because of this, I'm in the process of obtaining the CKA to address those gaps.

To hiring managers out there: Would you hire someone or accept the CKA as a replacement for X years of real Kubernetes experience?

For those of you who obtained the CKA for this reason, did it help you in your job search?

https://redd.it/1r5nh8z
@r_devops

How I Built a Production-Grade Kubernetes Homelab on 2 Recycled PCs (Proxmox + Talos Linux, ~€150)

I wrote a detailed walkthrough on building a production-grade Kubernetes homelab using 2 recycled desktop PCs (\~€150 total). The stack covers Proxmox for virtualization, Talos Linux as an immutable K8s OS, ArgoCD for GitOps, and Traefik + Cloudflare Tunnel for external access.

Key topics: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, GlusterFS for replicated storage, External Secrets Operator with Bitwarden, and a full monitoring stack (Prometheus + Grafana + Loki).

Full article: https://medium.com/@sylvain.fano/how-i-built-a-production-grade-kubernetes-homelab-in-2-weekends-with-claude-code-b92bca5091d3

Happy to discuss architecture decisions or answer any questions!

https://redd.it/1r5m7ir
@r_devops

Weekly/temp DevOps ENTRY LEVEL - internship / fresher & changing careers

This is a weekly thread to ask questions about getting into DevOps.

If you are a student, or want to start career in DevOps but do not know how? Ask here.

Changing careers but do not have basic prerequisites? Ask here.

Before asking

try to search if your question was asked and answered
try these resources
[https://roadmap.sh/devops](https://roadmap.sh/devops)
(please suggest more)

_____________

Individual posts of this type may be removed and redirected here.

Please remember to follow the rules and remain civil and professional.

This is a trial weekly thread.

https://redd.it/1r659ga
@r_devops

I've run Docker Swarm in production for 10 years. $166/year. 24 containers. Two continents. Zero crashes. Here's why I never migrated to Kubernetes.

Every week on Reddit someone asks about Docker Swarm and the responses are always the same: "Swarm is dead." "Just use K8s." "Nobody runs Swarm in production."

I've run Swarm in production for a decade. Not a toy setup — multi-node clusters, manager redundancy, 4-6 replicas per service, rolling deployments in batches of two with automatic rollback on healthcheck failure. Zero customer downtime. Over the years I optimized the architecture down to 24 containers across two continents on $166/year total infrastructure.

I finally wrote the article I wish existed when I made my choice ten years ago. 7,400 words. Real production numbers. Working code. No affiliate links. No "it depends" cop-out.

**What's in it:**

* Side-by-side YAML comparison: 27 lines (Compose) → 42 lines (Swarm) → 170+ lines (K8s) for the same app
* Healthcheck comparison table testing 6 failure scenarios — K8s wins 2 out of 6
* A working 150-line autoscaler that's actually smarter than K8s HPA (adaptive polling vs fixed 15s intervals)
* Cost breakdown: $166/year vs $1,584-2,304/year minimum for EKS
* CAST AI 2024 data: 87% idle CPU, 68% of pods overprovisioned 3-8x, $50-500K annual waste per cluster
* Why your Node.js containers are 7x bigger than they need to be and how that drives false demand for autoscaling
* Why you should never expose Node.js directly to the internet (and what to do instead)

The only feature K8s genuinely has that Swarm lacks is autoscaling — and Datadog's own 2023 report shows only \~50% of K8s organizations even use HPA. So half the industry is paying the full complexity tax for a feature they don't use.

Not saying K8s is bad. It's an incredible system for the 1% who need it. But the data shows 99% don't — they're paying 10-100x more for capabilities they never touch while 87% of their CPU does nothing.

[Read Full Web Article Here](https://thedecipherist.com/articles/docker_swarm_vs_kubernetes/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=docker-swarm-vs-kubernetes&utm_content=launch-post&utm_term=r-devops)

Happy to answer any questions. I've been running this setup since before K8s hit 1.0.

https://redd.it/1r6krmk
@r_devops

Security Scanning, SSO, and Replication Shouldn't Be Behind a Paywall — So I Built an Open-Source Artifact Registry

Side project I've been working on — but more than anything I'm here to pick your brains.

I felt like there was no truly open-source solution for artifact management. The ones that exist cost a lot of money to unlock all the features. Security scanning? Enterprise tier. SSO? Enterprise tier. Replication? You guessed it. So I built my own.

Artifact Keeper is a self-hosted, MIT-licensed artifact registry. 45+ package formats, built-in security scanning (Trivy + Grype + OpenSCAP), SSO, peer mesh replication, WASM plugins, Artifactory migration tooling — all included. No open-core bait-and-switch.

What I really want from this post:

\- Tell me what drives you crazy about Artifactory, Nexus, Harbor, or whatever you're running

\- Tell me what you wish existed but doesn't

\- If something looks off or missing in Artifact Keeper, open an issue or start a discussion

GitHub Discussions: https://github.com/artifact-keeper/artifact-keeper/discussions

GitHub Issues: https://github.com/artifact-keeper/artifact-keeper/issues

You don't have to submit a PR. You don't even have to try it. Just tell me what sucks about artifact management and I'll go build the fix.

But if you do want to try it:

https://artifactkeeper.com/docs/getting-started/quickstart/

Demo: https://demo.artifactkeeper.com

GitHub: https://github.com/artifact-keeper

https://redd.it/1r6pwxy
@r_devops

Can we stop with the LeetCode for DevOps roles?

I just walked out of an interview where I was asked to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard. For a Platform Engineering role.

In what world does that help me troubleshoot a 502 error in an Nginx ingress or optimize a Jenkins build that’s taking 40 minutes?

I'd much rather be asked:

1. "How do you handle a dev who refuses to follow the CI/CD flow?"
2. "Walk me through how you’d debug a DNS issue in a multi-region cluster."
3. "Explain the trade-offs of using a Service Mesh."

Is anyone else still seeing heavy LeetCode, or are companies finally moving toward practical, scenario-based testing?

https://redd.it/1ra4poz
@r_devops

Recently Accepted Jr Devops Role!!

I recently accepted a junior devops role where I'll be using a lot of terraform and ansible allegedly. Since I'm still waiting on the official start date to come I figured I'd get started learning these early so the ramp up is quicker and man...


I did the terraform hello world yesterday spinning up a docker container and that was fun enough, so I set out with a goal today when I woke up, provision and configure a vanilla minecraft server before I go to sleep. 10 hours later and here I am writing this post with a vanilla server running on my t3.small chugging away as I run across the world just amazed at how much I was able to get done today. Boys I fear my journey has just begun and I am excited for what is ahead of me!

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

our "self-service platform" is just a Jira board with extra steps

we spent six months building an "internal developer platform" and I just realized it's basically a form that creates a Jira ticket which gets manually processed by the same three people as before. the only difference is now there's a React frontend on top of it.anyone here actually built a platform that genuinely reduced toil and developers actually use voluntarily? what did you get right that we clearly didn't?

https://redd.it/1radws1
@r_devops

Rest api development in a microservices world, where does governance even fit and who owns it

Sixty services and the api layer looks like a yard sale. Different auth patterns, versioning nobody agreed on, rate limiting that exists on maybe half of them and is configured differently on each one that has it.

Platform team (three people including me) keeps getting pulled into incidents that should belong to service teams but don't because there's no standard anyone actually follows. And every time I raise this in an architecture review I get "it depends" answers that don't help me figure out what to actually do next week.

Gateway enforcement or ci/cd enforcement? Who owns the standard, platform or the services? How do you make teams follow it without becoming the bottleneck for every api deployment?

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

Looking to work for free on real devops projects to gain experience

Hi everyone,

I'm learning DevOps and looking to work under an experienced DevOps freelancer to understand real-world projects and workflows.

I'm comfortable with:

\- AWS basics (EC2, VPC, IAM, ALB)

\- Linux & networking fundamentals

\- CI/CD basics

\- Hands-on practice with deployments and troubleshooting

I'm not asking for payment. I'm happy to assist with tasks like documentation, monitoring, testing, basic deployments, or shadowing—anything that helps reduce your workload while | learn.

If you're a freelancer who could use an extra pair of hands (or know someone who might), I'd really appreciate connecting via DMs.

Thanks for reading!

https://redd.it/1r9zhgx
@r_devops

Infra aware tool

Hi. Got hired recently to a big product company and noticed how difficult is onboarding process. Outdated confluence pages, unclear inventory. Nobody can tell for sure how many clusters we have(except CTO maybe), VMs are spread across OCI, AWS and Azure clouds. Hundreds of build configurations in TeamCity for various purposes.

So for me as a new devops getting hands on this infra takes months and still I am finding stuff that I was never aware of.

Question is - if there will be some infra aware chat gpt that you can ask like how many VMs we have with windows arm 64 or which k8s clusters are below 1.30 version, etc. would it make sense in your team ? Would it solve your operational overhead as it would do for me?

https://redd.it/1ram2sv
@r_devops

How likely it is Reddit itself keeps subs alive by leveraging LLMs?

Is reddit becoming Moltbook.. it feels half of the posta and comments are written by agents. The same syntax, structure, zero mistakes, written like for a robot.

Wtf is happening, its not only this sub but a lot of them. Dead internet theory seems more and more real..

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

jq 101 – Practical guide to parsing JSON from the CLI

If you spend your days in the AWS CLI, Azure CLI, Kubernetes, or Terraform, you already know: you’re swimming in JSON. Most folks just pipe everything to grep, scroll through endless output, or hack together a Python noscript for a problem jq solves in seconds.

So, I put together a straight-to-the-point technical guide. It covers the core jq moves: things like .key, .array[\], select(), length, and sort_by. I walk through real examples with a public API, and I tie those examples directly to what you see in AWS and Azure CLI outputs. The patterns I show? They handle about 90% of what you actually deal with in the cloud.

No stories, no fluff. Just clear, practical jq tricks built for DevOps and SRE work. If you’re in the CLI all the time but JSON filtering still feels awkward, this guide clears things up.

Link:

https://medium.com/@odinumbelino/jq-101-how-to-parse-json-like-a-pro-a883ca08b3f9

Feedback welcome.

https://redd.it/1raeo3r
@r_devops

I'm being asked to provide inputs

I was asked recently which platform I should pick for our a new self-service pipeline. There are only 2 options given, ECS or EKS/AKS. We have presence on both providers. My knowledge on both is little so I can't decide which one to choose. It seems like my boss is leaning towards k8s since his team has used it before. However, he is still asking me which technology I should use. He also mentioned argocd. I saw it in action in a cncf conference and was quite amazed with the demo. How would you decide on it?

Oh, he is aware that it can take several months in building the new self service tooling and he's ok with that.

https://redd.it/1radje6
@r_devops

Is it possible to use your IDE on your phone??

Hey devs, I wanted to ask if there is any way that I can use my IDE directly on my phone? So that what I have on my laptop is syncing with my phone too.

Is this possible?

https://redd.it/1rat13s
@r_devops

Former software developers, how did you land your first DevOps role?

Hi there! I’m currently a senior full stack software developer in a .NET/react/Azure stack. I love programming and building products but my real passion is building Linux machines, working with Docker and kubernetes, building pipelines, writing automations and monitoring systems, and troubleshooting production issues. I have AWS experience in a previous job where we deployed services to an EKS cluster using GitOps (argocd)

I am currently learning everything I can get my hands on in the hopes of transitioning my career to full time DevOps (infra/cloud engineer, SRE, platform engineer, DevOps engineer, etc)

Right now I’m targeting moving internally - my company does not have a DevOps team and our architects handle all the k8s deployments, IaC, azure environments, etc and it’s proving to be a real bottleneck. I have some buy in already about standing up a true DevOps team but I fear I’ll be passed over because I’m thought to be too valuable on the product development side (inferred from convo with my manager).

I’ve also been scouring job boards for DevOps jobs but am still figuring out the gaps in my current knowledge to get me prepared for an external interview.

I also am in the process of building a kubernetes home lab on bare metal, and I run a side business building and hosting client apps on my Linode k8s cluster.

If you came from product dev as a software developer and are now full time DevOps, how did you do it?

Note: I am in the US.

Edit: adding that I am currently trying to learn Go as a compliment to the DevOps skills I have already - i noticed a lot of DevOps jobs are actually big on python - worth learning instead?

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

Self-Studying Data Engineering — Project Ideas & Open-Source Contributions

I'm a student self-learning Data Engineering. I have a few questions regarding :

1. Projects - What DE projects actually matter when applying without a traditional background in it ? What have you built or seen that genuinely impressed a hiring team?
2. Open Source - I want to contribute to DE/ML open source to learn in public and build credibility. Where should a self-taught person start , who doesn't have years of experience of production ? Specific repos with good onboarding would mean a lot.

FYI: I'm self-taught, comfortable with Python and SQL, dbt ; still learning concepts and growing stack.

https://redd.it/1rat38p
@r_devops

Need Suggestion for Devops Begineer

I'm beginning to learn DevOps, and I'd like to find internship/junior opportunities to get hands-on experience in the field. I am starting with foundational technologies such as Linux, Git, Docker, and CI/CD Pipelines but would appreciate any advice regarding how to proceed.



Here are my current skills/progress:

Docker containerization and using docker-compose

Using GitHub Actions and Jenkins for simple CI/CD

Cloud experiments using Free tier (AWS)



I have some questions specifically about remote opportunities.

What kind of portfolio projects would be attractive to remote companies?

What tools should I familiarize myself with that would be beneficial for remote or part-time positions?

What are some effective methods of applying for remote positions? (LinkedIn outreach, Upwork, AngelList, open-source?)

Are there any resources (virtual internships/bootcamps) that would provide me with valuable remote experience?

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

Sprints/Agile/Scrum? What to use when not really doing Programming?

Sorry if this is a silly question but I would love to understand what others are doing?

For context, I was previously a SysAdmin specialising in On Prem servers. Three years ago, I moved to a Cloud Engineer role. I was the only Cloud Engineer for but I do now have a junior reporting to me.

Most of our work isn't programming. We do IaC and there's noscripting in Bash/PowerShell but we're not reporting to Project Managers the stage of a project, etc. A lot of our work is more to do with deployments, troubleshooting servers, maintenance, cost optimisation, etc.

Generally my to do list has always been captured in a notebook but I'm conscious we're not doing Sprints/Agile/Standup and I am wondering if I am missing out on something really powerful... When I've watched videos it sounds quite confusing with Scrum Managers, etc but I'm also concerned that if I went elsewhere as a Senior with no experience in these strategies I would look quite bad.

We have Jira at work - I personally found it quite complicated - Epics, Stories, Poker?, etc. I tried setting up a "sprint start" and "sprint end" meeting but it ended up just being a regular catchup because a lot of our work takes longer than a week since we are often waiting on other teams and dealing with ad-hoc tickets, etc.

Sorry if this isn't a great question. I feel a bit dumb asking but I would love to get a few "Day in the Life" examples from others so I can see how we compare and how I can better improve.

Thanks!

https://redd.it/1raz8zq
@r_devops

Starting Cloud/DevOps career — is full CCNA worth it or are networking basics enough?

Hi all,

I’m a CS student planning to move into Cloud/DevOps as a fresher and looking at a 6-8 month training program. They cover Linux + CCNA (networking) in the first half and AWS + DevOps tools in the second half.

My main confusion is about CCNA — for someone targeting entry-level DevOps roles, is doing the full CCNA actually worth the time, or are networking fundamentals (IP, DNS, ports, routing basics, etc.) enough to learn on my own?

If you were starting again as a beginner, what would you focus on instead to become job-ready faster?

Would really appreciate practical advice from people working in DevOps/Cloud. Thanks!

https://redd.it/1raogv8
@r_devops

Built a tool to search production logs 30x faster than jq

I built zog in Zig (early stages)

Goal: Search JSONL files at NVMe speed limits (3+ GB/s)

Key techniques:

1. SIMD pattern matching - Process 32 bytes/instruction instead of 1

2. Double-buffered async I/O - Eliminate I/O wait time

3. Zero heap allocations - All scanning in pre-allocated buffers

4. Pre-compiled query plans - No runtime overhead

Results: 30-60x faster than jq, 20-50x faster than grep

Trade-offs I made:

\- No JSON AST (can't track nesting)

\- Literal numeric matching (90 ≠ 90.0)

\- JSONL-only (no pretty-printed JSON)

For log analysis, these are acceptable limitations for the massive speedup.

GitHub: https://github.com/aikoschurmann/zog

Would love to get some feedback on this.

I was for example thinking about doing a post processing step where I do a full AST traversal after having done an early fast selection.

https://redd.it/1rb1kh3
@r_devops