If you are like me, it was very hard, but meaningful growth is hard.
To understand why it was hard for me, you should understand the preamble. I’m skipping past 15 years in IT as a systems administrator for places like Lockheed Martin and the Federal Government. I held a dozen certifications, a degree and a ton of diverse experience. Keep in mind it was all manual administration and some scripting. I was good at my job, nothing amazing, but I was certainly a strong traditional ops guy.
That being said …
I moved into a job where I was administering over 500 VMs. Awesome. But wait, I was volunteered to be part of a huge AWS buildout in the cloud. I forget that VMWare farm and those EMC SANs and all that other data center nonsense. Everything was about the cloud. I knew so little about it, but it came quickly apparent to me that it was wild and new and all the rules of engagement were very different.
Like, the seasoned admin I was, I began building on the cloud like I was building a data center, but that was the wrong way. My misguided efforts didn’t last long because a few months into the project, our PM said:
“We are bringing in DevOps.”
What the **** is DevOps.
I totally scoffed. It’s just a buzzword and I just have to weather it and get past this project.
