How should approach learning DevOps (AWS)?

1 points by amoitnga 5 years ago | 5 comments

TL;DR . What path should Rails dev(6years) should take to learn AWS DevOps.

I have a lot of free time and decided to use it to expand my skill in DevOps. I'm a web developer using Ruby on Rails (6years) & React(2years) primarily in my day to day job. We are small shop and have 3rd party consultants doing some work for us. Generally my company hasn't been happy with their work and will be looking to switch soon. This is appropriate time for me to get hands dirty, since it can be useful pretty much immediately. I decided to get a better grip on managing our rails app in cloud, AWS particularly since this is what we use. For context our app is Rails, MySql, ElasticSearch, Redis.

We are in process of switching to docker from deploying to EC2 using capistrano gem.

I tried to get AWS certified before but it was extremely boring and not really helpful. It seems like they want me to know everything about every service they offer, how pricing works and little details that are really difficult to remember if you don't actively use them.

So I've decided to ask you guys for some advice on how someone with my skill set and experience should approach this? I assume I need docker. I took a course on Udemy about a year ago, going to work through it again. What AWS certifications, if any, would you suggest? Can you recommend some online classes? Can you help me develop list of 'must know' apps/tech/things?

bradknowles 5 years ago |

There are multiple different sites you can go to for training on AWS, and training towards getting the various AWS certifications. AWS has their own training, but outside of that probably best known is acloud.guru, and there are many others.

In your case, I would start with the AWS Certified Developer path (see https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-developing/), and then look at the Operations path (see https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-operations/). But the training and the certifications are only part of the picture. Speaking only for myself, I don’t really learn something until I have to do it for real, and especially if I then have to teach it to others. So, I would encourage you to try to find ways to actually use these tools in real-world scenarios.

In my experience, AWS doesn’t do a whole lot with Kubernetes. Sure, you can use it on AWS, but the more native AWS solutions are Lambda functions, and if you want to go with more classic containers, then you’d be looking at Fargate if you don’t want to manage your own container management system, or ECS if you do want to manage your own container management system. EKS is the AWS flavor of Kubernetes, but is not as common.

bradknowles 5 years ago |

Note that I have recently taken and passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, and am currently studying for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam. We’re doing study groups at work, based around the material from acloud.guru, which is available to us for free thanks to our employer. I’m leading the AWS CCP study group, and a co-worker of mine is leading the AWS CSA-A study group, which I’m also in.

Yes, it’s a lot of random stuff to remember, much of which doesn’t seem to have a great deal of bearing on the AWS technology that we use on a daily basis in our real work, which I’ve been doing for years. But I am still learning a lot, and I’m convinced that there are important gaps that are being filled in my education, thanks to the classes we’re taking and certifications we’re getting.

I do find that I can listen to the video class material at 1.5x normal speed, and still follow along. It helps things pass along quicker. But for the CCP exam, my first time around I got about halfway through before I gave up and just took the exam cold, because I kept falling asleep during the videos. This second time around, I have to pay more attention, because I’m leading the study group, and I have to help teach this material to others. I did pass the exam the first time, but I plan on taking it again, because I want a higher score.

bprager 5 years ago |

Docker is good. Jenkins is a must. Start with AWS Certified Developer and then take the AWS DevOps Engineering. Next I would take on Kubernetes. I would also learn Ansible and Terraform. When you finish with the ELK stack, you have some basics.

Minor49er 5 years ago |

Check out qwiklabs.com. A former employer gave us credits for it to refine our AWS knowledge and we enjoyed it. Their lessons and exercises walk you through real AWS interactions and give you some relatively meaningful tasks to accomplish. They have a wide variety of lessons too, so I'm sure you could find a lot to gear yourself up for DevOps work.

bradknowles 5 years ago |

With regards to CI/CD on AWS, the tools are CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, etc.... Sure, you can run a Jenkins server on AWS, but that’s not the AWS-native way to go.