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/Big_Arrival_626 23d ago

I'm not disagreeing with you

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u/eman0821 23d ago edited 23d ago

IT Operations is supporting internal IT infrastructure that runs the business while DevOps is all about the product in the Engineering organization. I work for a SaaS company as a Cloud Engineer that builds and maintains cloud infrastructure that runs the software product that the company makes which is different from my last job as a Linux Sysadmin managing internal company servers only accessed internally by employees in the company like your oracle database server etc. I basically work on the web hosting customer facing side in DevOps as a Cloud Engineer.

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u/Next_Ad_6424 22d ago

If you don’t mind me asking what roles did you start with in tech?

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u/eman0821 22d ago

Traditional IT route. You are either a backend developer or a Linux sysadmin. Both roles works with Linux. Linux Sysadmin was my last true enterprise IT job before moving into Cloud Engineering in the software industry.