I had the privilege of interviewing a fellow YouTuber, Sid from DevOps directive last week and he gave a lot of great advice and information about the field of DevOps. I will try to briefly review everything we went over here.

If you would like to see the full interview, check it out on my YouTube channel.

What is DevOps?

Here is the section of the video where the question was asked.

"DevOps is a combination of two words, development and operations." The development stage is where the application gets built and operations handles the deployments and what happens after that. These two functions used to be separate and siloed in many companies, which is not ideal for information sharing or efficiency. DevOps roles allow the individuals handling deployments to be closely connected with what happens in the development stage of the application as well. It also promotes the ideas of continuous integration and continuous deployment to be able to quickly test and deploy new features.

There were several follow up questions to this in the video as well.

How much coding is needed for DevOps?

Must know configuration-style programming like YAML. Sid said about a third of his work is that style of programming and then another third is application programming. He updates application code where necessary to support the infrastructure that he sets up.

Later in the interview, Sid talks about specific languages and says that Python is pretty much the standard but a lot of companies are using Golang as well; especially for DevOps tooling.

DevOps Skillset

If you are interested in learning DevOps, Sid recommends taking a look at this chart of all the skills you might need. He also talks about the pathways of getting into DevOps and recommends that you start in either software development or as a sys admin first. Here is where he talks about this in the video.

For specific technologies, Sid mentioned using Kubeflow, Kubernetes, and various cloud platforms. You will find all of those skills in the chart linked above :)

Which cloud is better to start with: AWS, GC, or Azure?

There is no completely right answer for this question but Sid recommend Google Cloud to start as it might be easier to get your feet wet with deployments there. For job prospects, he recommended AWS as the industry leader and most popular platform by far.

Here is where he talks about this in the video.

We talked about so many more interesting things in the interview so I added timestamps to the video so you can conveniently scrub through it.

Here is Sid's YouTube channel for more on DevOps: https://www.youtube.com/c/DevOpsDirective

Let me know if you have any interview requests or recommendations. Have a great week :)