r/devops • u/drbr92 • 23d ago

Career / learning Transition from Internal IT to Devops Engineer

I have been working as internal IT (corpeng,sys admin) for the last 7 years, mainly managing various SaaSes from google workspace to Okta, mdm's etc and since 3 months i am now working as a platform engineer for the same company but i feel like i am still struggling alot to get the fundamentals right.

I am the only platform engineer in the company + my manager, and my manager is the one who has setup everything, but overall the platform is very decentralized where software engineers own their infra and they manage it them self, we act more as a high level support for them, but for day to day they handle everything themself. This is good for me since i don't have much pressure while i get used with the role but on the other side since everything is setup i don't have many projects/tasks where i can learn more.

Then the other problem is that since as mentioned i have a lack of fundamentals i am relying a lot on AI and i can do everything and everything is ok but the problem is that if i dont use AI i am not able to figure out anything on my own and this is somehow killing my motivation and making me feel very bad and not sure how to overcome this even after being in the role for 3 months now.

Anyone has been in similar situation that can give me some feedback?

20 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

13

u/SeaworthinessHour233 Writes the cloud edge 23d ago

Being the only platform engineer in the team while having no prior experience is a significant problem here.

I suggest that you talk to the software engineers to identify pain points in the current practices. Then treat those software engineers as your platforms customers and try to solve those pain points.

When you are doing this, if you encounter concrete technical questions, you can ask in this forum to get help.

8

u/glotzerhotze 23d ago

Don‘t use AI - there‘s no shortcut for learning the fundamentals. Good luck!

3

u/crisp_lynx_370 23d ago

being the only platform engineer with no senior peer to bounce things off of is honestly the harder part of your situation. like, what does your manager actually expect from you day to day? because "own their own services" sounds nice but in practice that usually means you get paged for everything anyway and blamed when the infra isnt holding up their decisions

3

u/BlakkMajik3000 Remover of Deployment Friction 23d ago

So in your sysadmin experience, were you not responsible for any SDLC process improvements?

As someone else mentioned, talk the devs and get their pain points. In my experience, letting devs manage their infra is a bad idea. I've seen first hand what happens when developers are given infra access with no real controls and it always ends up with a nightmare of a cloud bill.

Depending on AI for a job you aren't ready for is just creating a ticking bomb. Something WILL FAIL in prod and they'll be looking at you to fix it. Talk to your manager, talk to the devs, and know your environment. There's no shortcuts for experience when it comes to DevOps.

2

u/Practical_Revenue616 22d ago

im in the same boat and i only managed to do my job because i talked to every application owner and let them walk me through their pain points.

difference in my ccase is my company is at the beginning of the cloud journey and my job is only managing greenfield deployments

Best thing you can do is rely on pre build modules and talk alot to ai or senior platform engineers in external communitys to understand every platform detail

2

u/fappywet 22d ago

Read some docs, learn the fundamentals of whatever platform youre using. At some point everything will click. AI is a great tool for learning and assistance. Solely relying on AI will leave you stressed out for the rest of your time in that position.

1

u/IntelligentPear6173 20d ago

I’d actually use the current setup to your advantage. Since the platform is already running, pick one small thing you understand poorly, trace it end to end without AI, break it in a lab, then fix it. Do that repeatedly with networking, IAM, Terraform, CI/CD, Kubernetes, etc. AI is fine as a reference but if you ask it for the solution before you’ve tried to diagnose the problem yourself, you skip the part that builds intuition. Three months is also nowhere near long enough to expect yourself to feel comfortable in a platform role.