Ask HN: What's the baseline for cloud tech knowledge in modern web dev jobs?

4 points by ccajas 6 years ago | 2 comments

In most of my career, I've taught myself many programming concepts and different languages based on what I started out with. I'm comfortable with design patterns, many algorithms, certain monolithic applications, and know enough about databases to get a local app up and running fast. I've used a variety of languages and frameworks including JavaScript, Vue, React, PHP, and Ruby on Rails.

I am not so familiar the modern deploy and automate side of things. I cannot tell you, for instance, how to leverage AWS to optimize a website I made, once it goes online. However, more and more jobs are requiring it, so I must learn to stay on point. But I don't know what is "enough" for a good starting point with talking about it at web dev job interviews.

From 2008-2013 the deployment workflow at my jobs was similar: Setup DNS and databases with your hosting service, upload website files directly via FTP, and migrate database. Following that time, I rarely did any of that and almost all of my work has been in local machine space. If I needed to upload code to a source code repository, I use Git. If I wanted to demo a side project online, I use Heroku.

It's a big ocean to start Googling for tutorials for things like AWS, Azure, data stores and the like. What are some good starting points? Or books to read (I prefer free ones)? In a post-cloud, post-Kubernetes world, what is the minimum standard for entry in web dev jobs?

evoneutron 6 years ago |

I recently made a career transition from SWE to DevOps/SRE role. The big difference is tooling - IaC tools like terraform/ansible/chef is a must because automation is key. Those are also like scripting languages (declarative/procedural) instead of OO.

Generally requires a different thinking too - when you develop code on localhost you can ignore all the networking constraints, monitoring, logging etc.

In a production system those components are critical, so the focus becomes more on understanding how the full system functions, rather than just the business logic of the code.

A lot depends on experience but I think in general it's better to move from Dev -> DevOps than from Ops -> DevOps. Especially now that IaC is the primary tool that you would use.

potta_coffee 6 years ago |

I can only speak based on my personal experience, which is anecdotal, but I think a good starting point would be learning to duplicate the deployments you're familiar with, in AWS. Some simple projects would be:

- Spin up an EC2 instance, set up SSL, configure webserver, deploy application.

- Create an AMI from your instance, destroy instance and restore from AMI.

- Host a static site on S3.

- Use an IAC (Infrastructure as Code) tool to provision resources - CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.

- Use CodeBuild and github to setup a continuous deployment pipeline.

Each of these little projects can be done in a day or two, if you can do them all, you'll know your way around AWS and be able to do some useful things.

Some (paid) resources I've found helpful are https://acloud.guru/ and https://linuxacademy.com/

Good luck!