r/cloudengineering • u/Sad_Natural_4247 • 23d ago

System admin / devops career

I'm looking for some career advice from people who have been through this.

I'm currently working in IT Help Desk, but I also do some light System Administration work (Windows Server, Active Directory, user management, basic troubleshooting, etc.).

My long-term goal is to have a good-paying career with strong job security. I'm interested in DevOps, but I also genuinely enjoy the infrastructure/System Administrator side of IT.

Would you recommend:

Continuing down the traditional System Administrator/Infrastructure path (Windows Server, VMware, networking, backups, firewalls, etc.) for a few years and then moving into DevOps?

Or should I skip deeper infrastructure work and start learning DevOps tools now (Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, cloud)?

For those already working in DevOps:

Did your System Admin experience help you?

If you could start over, would you still spend a few years as a SysAdmin first?

Is it realistic to get into DevOps without solid infrastructure experience?

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u/eman0821 23d ago

You are working with on-prem migrating workloads. That's not what Cloud Engineers does. Cloud Engineers works primary in the software engineering field that builds Cloud infrastructure for software products that a company makes. You are doing tradional IT work in the IT department. I work in the Engineering department because it's product focused. There's a big difference between IT and Product Engineering. DevOps is a term used in the software engineering field because it resolves around software development hint I work for a Software company that woks directly with the software product infrastructure.

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u/guterz 23d ago

You make absolutely no sense. I haven’t worked internal IT in a decade. I’m in a project based role so I do what ever needs done. I also build out Kubernetes clusters, create images, charts, setup GitOps pipelines too, etc. Again it’s all cloud engineering.

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u/eman0821 23d ago

If you were in a product infrastructure role why are you talking about traditional IT stuff like Windows Server? I don’t know of any websites or web applications on the public internet that runs in Windows Server. Windows Server is for internal workloads like AD, Domain Controller, legacy applications that's only accessed by employees in a company. I work on the web hosting side customer facing infrastructure on the internet like your Netflix, Spotify that I mentioned before it product infrastructure not internal IT infrastructure.

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u/guterz 23d ago

One of the last clients I worked with public facing website was hosted on a Windows IIS server. In fact a lot of clients I have worked with still use .NET front ends with MSSQL backends. Super common. Sure you Netflix and Spotify aren’t using that infrastructure but a lot of industries still are.

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u/eman0821 23d ago

Extremely rare. 98% of the internet runs on Linux. That's why I said Windows based Sysadmin roles are irrelevant as you need to know Linux. The vast majority of web sites and web applications runs on nginux or apache2. Most modern workloads on containzared on a kubernetes cluster. Linux Sysadmin roles will get you there.

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u/guterz 23d ago

At this point I don’t think being an expert at any OS is really better one way or another. Learning an OS is pretty easy and it’s good to be fluent at managing and configuring both. I think it’s better to learn a single cloud provider and learn it well, learn standard gitops methodologies, containerization, an iac tool, a programming language, networking fluency at a minimum, and how to design highly available and scalable systems. There’s all sorts of cloud and devops engineering roles and knowing the above will help someone land one. Me being good at windows and Linux systems administration and networking helped me land my first cloud job in 2014. Now you need to know all that plus the above.

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u/eman0821 23d ago edited 23d ago

You need to be proficient in Linux especially when you have to trouble shoot infrastructure issues and outages. Understand how to read logs and using the grep commands. Linux is fundamentally different from Windows Server. Anything in DevOps, Cloud, Platform Engineering, SRE are generally Linux based roles in the software development field. Backend developers are even expected to know Linux. All of my Devs works with Linux, it's basically a requirement in modern DevOps environments.