I'm trying to write a bit more about things I'm actively doing. With my current job I've found a challenge that I didn't know existed and it's exciting and sometimes mentally overwhelming. Let me explain.. ## What do I do? DevSecOps...SRE....I'm not sure what people want to call it anymore. I basically do the hard automation work behind the scenes to get people to production. I enjoy it a lot, it "tickles" the part of my brain that can always find a process to improve that I find very cool. ## So what is the challenge? Great question. The challenge in this space is adjusting for customer and knowing when too many tools is too much. My time in devops has seen many different customers from scientist and development teams to deployment teams to system admins. I thought the system admins were scary since I've never actually been a system admin. I don't know what they want/need to be successful. What I learned during that time is that you can ask a few questions and learn a lot to be useful. As for tools that has been interesting. I've build for cloud and on-prem using things like gitlab pipelines, Jenkins jobs, terraform, ansible, and straight up manual. I know manual is seen as bad, but sometimes you just need to get something setup quick and write the docs to automate later. Now when you are using all the tools you should understand what works best for what you need to do. I have enough experience that I can be super opinionated in these things, but there seems to be some common tools for everything now. Hashicorp, Ansible, and Gitlab really run the automation area and no surprise given how easy it is to get using. > Taking a moment here to point out that I still think HCL is stupid and the learning curve isn't ideal. I don't really understand why hashicorp just didn't use ansible but whatever. Here is my normal work toolbox now: packer for creating gold image, terraform to deploy server shell, ansible to setup what the server does, and gitlab pipelines to automate everything from test to deployment. YAML and HCL are my most common language here and if you are going to be in devops it should be some of the strongest in your toolbox. Everything I automate I've done manually as well. For me this is important for notes. I'm big on taking notes. I don't enjoy trying to rely on my memory. I make local notes, these blog post, and work confluence pages for how tos and proposals. I mentioned above that adjusting customers has been a challenge. More core tools make it easier for me to adapt to any customer. The common need for most customers is a constant environment from test to production. With my core tools I can build a long term bank of scripts/files that can work for any team. That's what you want. If you can start building a generic toolbox you can take anywhere you will be working 4hours a day in no time. ## What happened to Kubernetes? Valid question. That focused hasn't changed for me but before you can even deploy into a cluster you need to to build out your environment and maybe even some base images. Everything in the blog post is more "building the foundation". Kubernetes is more of "building the actual house". I'm still keeping up with kubernetes in the background but the bulk of my time now is building up my "gold" toolbox.